Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

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

But why abandon a little kingdom? Why, indeed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you accept ... Moqui—”

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

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

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

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

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

A combined Indian Agency, half Hopi, half Navajo, and the two ancient enemies who fraternized on the surface when the Agent was strong enough to compel it. Ninety miles back in the hills. No telephone and no telegraph. And agents averaged about two years each of service. What happened to them? I wondered. Were they buried there, quietly and without fuss, or did they depart between suns, seeking more peaceful climes? The padres were not an excellent vision, and the Spaniards had abandoned the country as hopeless, notwithstanding their usual methods of domination. True—there was such a thing as having a chap on for the good of his soul, after the manner of whimsical Arizona.

I debated the matter seriously before answering that wire. My plans were changing. From six months, my exile had been extended into a year; and the year was now up. Acceptance would mean a longer stay, an habitation enforced, as I would be under bond and no longer free to come and go, with the added chance of failure in an unsought position of responsibility. I had not envied my old Chief. I do not envy any Indian Agent to-day.

And yet—the Desert called to me from over beyond those blue-toned Buttes to come and find that intangible something “just around the corner.” So finally, like Kipling’s Pagan, I decided:—

And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an’ see.

X

THE PROVINCES OF THE “MOHOCE OR MOHOQUI”

It now remains for me to tell about this city and kingdom
and province, of which the Father Provincial gave your
Lordship an account. In brief, I can assure you in reality
he has not told the truth in a single thing that he said,
but everything is the reverse of what he said, except the
name of the city and the large stone houses.—Don Francisco
Vasquez Coronado to Don Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy
of New Spain, August 3, 1540

I am now glad that I went to the Painted Desert and entered Hopi-land before the advent of the automobile. The going then was a picturesque if toilsome journey. After two days in a farm-wagon loaded with my plunder, I reached the first back-country trading-post, and met the official I was to succeed. That old store at Indian Wells, with its back against the hills, seemed a fanciful place in the twilight of a summer’s day. Across a wide plain lifted purple mesas gashed with red clays, and Rabbit-ear Butte stuck its two inquisitive peaks into the evening sky. There was something far removed in the atmosphere and setting of Indian Wells, something of true desert solitude.

Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone, a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace, but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, and its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large, pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough, and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet, and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat.

It takes a long time to make forty miles in a wagon of that type, whatever the entertainment of political conventions and presidential anecdotes.

In late afternoon we crossed the sandy waste of the Jedito Wash, and passed out of it by a steep rocky road that ascended a high mesa. A short distance to the left were the ruins of Awatobi, that once important pueblo of Tusayan, where Tovar had his first view of and encounter with the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” of the Spanish chronicles. This meeting occurred twenty-five years before the settlement of St. Augustine, and eighty years before the gentlemen from Plymouth reached the historic New England Rock. He was accompanied by that intrepid soldier-priest, Fray Juan de Padilla, who later retraced Coronado’s trail into the mysterious and legendary country of Quivira, there to be martyred, the first white man to meet death in the present State of Kansas.

After the conquest of Cibola, or Zuni, Tovar was dispatched by Coronado to locate the seven cities of the Mohoqui. Notwithstanding the fighting in the Zuni provinces, the coming of pale men who rode strange animals and carried sticks that discharged lightning, it would appear that the Hopi knew nothing of these happenings. Tovar, leading a company of cavalry and footmen, crossed into their country without discovery, and encamped one night before a Hopi pueblo. It is recorded that they approached close enough to hear the people talking in their homes. Morning revealed the Spanish spears.

A little later came Cardenas, searching for the great cañon of the West; and Espejo in 1583; and then Onate in 1598, who was the first to make permanent settlements among the Pueblo Indians. It was Onate who established the missions, and one was built at Awatobi between 1621 and 1630, so Fray Alonzo de Benavides, the first custodian of missions in these provinces of New Spain, reported to his King.

Before the founding of Boston by Winthrop, when Charles I was King of England and Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury, a Franciscan friar named Porras ministered to the Hopi in the Tusayan provinces. In June 1633 he died there by poison. In this same year Galileo appeared before the Inquisition. Strange contrasts!

When the great Pueblo rebellion occurred in 1680, the mission at Awatobi was destroyed by the Hopi, and its friar, Fray José de Figueroa, was killed. [1] When came De Vargas, bent on reconquering the Pueblo people, he halted before Awatobi on November 19, 1692. The friars planned a return to their duties among the Hopi, and it would appear that the Awatobans, or a part of them, received these advances. Because of this the pueblo of Awatobi was suddenly destroyed in the latter part of 1700 by pagan Hopi from the other mesas. It is said that many of the warriors were stifled in the ceremonial kivas, and the women and children were carried off as captives. During the early years of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials and priests still contemplated a return to this territory, but the efforts were abortive, although as late as 1748 friars visited the Second Mesa country to return fugitive Indians of the Pueblos proper to their homes in the valley of the Rio Grande. Most of these were Sandias, the remnant of this band now living close to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and when I took charge of the Pueblo Indians in 1919, the Sandias above all others evidenced characteristics that were not new to one who had sat in council with their ancient hosts.

In 1911 only a series of low walls, the pueblo foundations, were discernible at Awatobi. The place of the old Spanish mission could not be determined. The blowing desert sand had quite nearly reclaimed the site to solitude and unbroken sterility. But following the sacred customs of their forefathers, the Hopi were still making trouble for their guardians.

My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope. Not even the size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira, including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then, having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await whatever the white man might see fit to do about it.

That was my inheritance.

Toward evening in the cañon country the sun grows a bit more burnishing. Ahead of us appeared a space in the cedars, and beyond that rift one could see a more distant desert, rising as a sunlit moor, but quite removed—as if one looked across a chasm. A little later the team tipped forward on a rocky ledge. With brakes applied, we began to grind downward—it seemed to me, straight down. On the left, walls of rock arose in sheer plane-faces, and to the right I gathered that there was nothing at all: just an empty hole, beginning two feet from the outer wheels, and nicely garnished with huge boulders awaiting some driver’s bad judgment.

I became more familiar with mesa trails thereafter, but this first one was a thrill. Sand had blown into the road, and the wheels crunched through it, and the brakes ground and screeched against the tires.

“When the troops were here last,” said the driver cheerfully, “a pack-mule went over at this place, and he rolled until he fetched up against the bottom.”

I silently wished he would attend to his driving.

“And there is your Agency,” said the official, pointing. “You can see as far as you like from that place, if you look straight up.”

Below in the great gash were the buildings of the plant, gray, lonely-looking, standing in barren grounds; but large as they were, the rocky walls of the cañon dwarfed them. So clear was the air that they appeared as toy houses, cut-outs pasted on a strip of pebbled cardboard. There was a straight line of them, for the cañon, generous enough in other dimensions, had not room for grouping at its bottom. It was a rough trough hewn by quake and flood. For centuries the waters had torn at it, until their bed was now far below the site of the buildings; and for centuries the sand had drifted in to form rounded domes that buttressed the walls. Each season’s tremors disturbed the shattered rocks, sending some to the bottom in tearing, grinding slides and posing others at new angles.

It was disappointing—a lonely, dreary place. No trees or hedges relieved the starved-looking site. There was little to be proud of. As for the natural beauties, one must grow to feel the majesty of worn rocks, tinted in all the shades of weathering sandstone, from saffron through gold to ruddy brown, toned to a thousand delicate hues by the stunted cedars and diversified cacti that struggled from every crevice. In the springtime there would be flowers in the crannies, winsome purple and pink flowers, with here and there the blazing scarlet of the Indian paintbrush; and in springtime too would come the great flocks of migratory birds.

Why build in such a place? The answer is that stereotyped one affecting everything in the Desert—water. At the upper end of this cañon lived the springs. Water could be brought to the site without great expense. There was enough to furnish a small settlement, and more than could have been harnessed cheaply at any other point of the territory when the plant was built. Water in greater quantity has been discovered since; but there were no “water-witches” in the provinces of the Mohoqui prior to 1910.

All that day the thunder had muttered sullenly, and occasionally a few drops of rain had fallen on us. It was too early in the year to expect a shower of any consequence, so my guides told me. It was June, and the red-bellied clouds that the Snake priests watch for do not appear until late August, when they herald the Snake Dance and prove Hopi wisdom; then cloudbursts send torrents through these cañons, and flood the plains, and guarantee the harvest. But, just as we drove up the main road, came a sharp downpour that settled into a rare thing indeed—a steady summer rain.

A group of Indians stood close as we alighted. This was a delegation of welcome, for the tribes are very curious. A Navajo grunted, “Nahtahni.” And a Hopi said something that brought smiles to their faces; it was interpreted to me as we shook hands around. He said, “You must be a good Chief, for you bring the rain.”

The Agency consisted of an office and quarters and shops for the clerks, farmers, and mechanics, and there was a school for about one hundred and fifty pupils of the grammar grades. This was a boarding-school and, in addition to teachers, it had a corps of cooks, matrons, laundress, and seamstress, all necessary to the work. In the field, close to the pueblos of the Indians, were five day-schools, serving from fifty to one hundred and twenty children each, and stations for physicians, field-nurses, and range men. Therefore the equipment, furniture, and stores of six small settlements had to be inventoried and receipted for at any change of directors.

The outgoing Agent was anxious to have his papers signed, that he might be off to his next post in further search of health. For two weeks we labored over those accounts, and it seemed that it would require another three months—as it did—to adjust and compare and reduce them to something approximating accuracy. So the major part of it was arranged conditionally between us, and I filed my official signature, together with bond for thirty thousand dollars, and we two shook hands as cordially as it was possible for men to do who had been debating for a fortnight.

In this manner I became Indian Agent for twenty-two hundred Hopi Indians of the Pueblo stock—maligned under a stupid Departmental label as “Moqui”—who would call me “Moungwi”; and for a trifle more of Navajo, the nomads of the desert, who would title me “Nahtahni,” very likely Nahtahni Yezzi, meaning Little Chief. They had undoubtedly named my predecessor Nahtahni Tso, Fat Chief.

That time of inventory I recall as a bad dream. Every conceivable article of useless equipment had been dumped and carefully preserved at that post. The greatest care had been taken of the most useless. Once, when the tailors of Chicago were long on swatches, they presented them to the Indian Service, and to save storage the warehouse custodian had promptly shipped them to the most distant point, the Moqui Agency, in the hope and quite sure belief that they would never come back. Aside from transcontinental railroad charges, Indian wagoners had hauled such precious supplies from the receiving station, one hundred miles, at a cartage of one cent per pound. So it was with hundreds of lamp-chimneys that never fitted a lamp, clothing too small for infants or too large for giants, machetes that were needed in the Cuban cane-fields, tools that Noah would have spurned, and broadcast seeders for use where the Indians plant corn with ceremonial sticks. One warehouse was jammed with wagon-repair material, spokes, fellies, bolsters, and so on, of dimensions that must have been current in the period of the pioneers.

Some of this waste had been the result of stupid ordering, while much of it grew from the system of yearly contracts, neither of which has changed unto this day. Smith furnishes wagons one year, by virtue of being the lowest bidder, and one must have Smith’s repair-parts. Next year Brown has the contract, again by virtue of being the lowest and therefore cheapest bidder; and part of Smith’s material is a dead loss to the Service.

The method of checking stores was a grotesque science. Sewing-needles were counted, the unit being a single needle, whereas darning needles were accepted by the hundred. Anvils, log-chains, sledges, and mason-axes were known by weight, other tools by description; still other tools identified by sets. Each textbook, each library and reference volume,—and there were thousands,—was known by its more or less involved title, and so catalogued and counted and charged every three months.

The technical names that came across Kansas with our forefathers had not changed. “Eveners” and “whiffle-trees” were recognized; but double and swingle-trees were taboo.

And there were things that even the Westerners’ Bible could not define. Apparently no one ever wrote to Montgomery Ward for “crandalls” or “loop-sticks.” Sometimes Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary helped to an explanation, and at other times the Encyclopædia Britannica shed light down the ages to identify an article. It was like examining and listing the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and we believed that the mummy of the original Indian Agent would be discovered in the depths of those cluttered warehouse-shrines.

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—

quite so—there were shoes, men’s, women’s, misses’, boys’, youths’ and children’s, each divided into two sorts: Sunday and everyday; twelve classifications, and all counted and all charged. There were boxes of sealing-wax, and cobblers’ wax, and beeswax, in quantity; and in the attenuated garden, irrigated by the hand-bucket method, grew something resembling cabbages where free Congressional seeds had been planted. There were no ships of the keel variety; it was too dry—even the fish carried canteens; but there were burros, those pack-ships of the Desert, that cheerfully doubled as “Arizona nightingales.” And there was one official king, who, if he did not find that crandall the smith had made in 1893, would have months of explaining to those who did not know then, and do not know now, what a crandall is.

At the same time the employees of the station were existing in pasteboard cottages designed for the climate of Southern California, and winter at that altitude—6600 feet—would bring many nights below zero. One couple lived in a tent heated by a sheet-iron stove; the miner lodged in a cupboard, and the chief mechanic’s family occupied a cellar. They were all, according to the Civil Service announcements, entitled to “quarters,” and did they not have them?

The returns were received as well from all the field points. Election night in the editorial rooms is but one night. After thirty days of this, I felt myself going mad; so I started forth to view the domain.

Having had but little experience in the handling of horses, I selected one of my Indian interpreters for Jehu, and so he proved. My idea was that an Indian not only would be a thorough horseman, but would possess the rare faculty of driving equally well after dark. The Indian has the eye of the eagle, say the books, and so on; and those winding, narrow, switchback roads did not invite me after nightfall. Sure enough, my first return to the cañon was made in pitch blackness; but I lolled in the buggy, well wrapped-up, enjoying a feeling of perfect security. An excellent thing to have an eagle’s eye, I thought—when suddenly the world tipped and heaved. There was a moment of crashing confusion and complete chaos. The lines and my Indian driver and I were all on the floor of the buggy together, hopelessly mixed and entangled in the blankets and foot-brake and nose-bags and halters. The vehicle had pitched forward, and seemed to have climbed on to the backs of the struggling horses. Jehu had driven over a six foot bank into an arroyo. Fortunately, the team had taken it straight over, without swerving and, fortunately too, those arroyo banks are of crumbling sand.

We scrambled out to catch the heads of the horses.

“What in the blankety-blank did you do that for?” I cried at the dazed Indian who, like myself, was very much numbed and scared. “Where were your eyes? Couldn’t you see the crossing to the left?”

“Didn’t you see it?” he mumbled.

“I can’t see in this dark—never pretended to; but you—you’re an Indian, and—”

“Indian eyes no different from white man’s!” he announced in his defense, and with complete composure. “I can’t see in the dark, either.”

Another precious ideal exploded.

XI

THE LAW OF THE REALM

Ko Ko. I want to consult you—

Pooh Bah. Certainly. In which of my capacities? As First
Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-General,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, or Private
Secretary?—The Mikado

A new Agent at the Cañon headquarters, a greenhorn to boot, and immediately a thousand questions were asked: questions of Indians, of employees, of missionaries, of traders, of traveling cattlemen and drummers, of tourists, of everyone having an interest in that country, even if ever so little. And the new Agent was to answer them all, promptly, that they might go forth with instructions and permits to do the things that they felt most necessary to themselves. I had brought a little book of regulations from Washington, and too, I thought of the commission. It read:—

All the duties relating to the Moqui schools, Agency, and the
Indians contiguous thereto, are hereby devolved upon you as
Superintendent.

Rather a large order, depending of course on how sincerely and conscientiously one would view the matter. Here were close to four thousand square miles of territory, having five thousand people of many conditions, three fourths of them uncombed savages; and all their problems devolved upon me.

I remember one particularly worthless Civil Service employee who once said to me: “But, Mr. Crane, you take these matters too seriously.”

It was necessary for me to cancel his engagement shortly thereafter. I did this abruptly, for he had shown a strong tendency to go off to sleep at the scales. He then emitted another philosophical remark, worthy of a Civil Service employee:—

“Well,” he said, “I will get home just at watermelon time.”

Now one does not have to take the thing seriously. I have followed several Agents who did not. But there is no traditional “George” in the Arizona Desert, and the Agent can always be found. He is the official goat, tagged, manacled, bonded. He may not leave his jurisdiction for longer than one week without having procured special permission; and when he goes, the work continues in the hands of irresponsibles under his responsibility and his bond. I spent several evenings with the little book of regulations, and answered my own queries.

What are the duties and responsibilities of an Indian Agent?

On a closed reservation, where the Indians are non-citizen wards:

1. He is the Disbursing Officer for all activities, and will
expend $100,000 or more yearly, the reserve’s allotment of
funds, without including the moneys of individual Indians that
may be deposited with him.

2. He directs a corps of employees, persons procured from the
Civil Service grab-bag (persons he does not select), a
gregarious and vagarious outfit, consisting of physicians,
nurses, stockmen, farmers or rangemen, mechanics, teachers; and
he often coöperates with the Irrigation or other services and
their corps.

3. When there is construction work of any kind, from quarters
and schools to roads and bridges, he often designs these
things, always passes on the efficiency, and nearly always
directs the actual work.

4. As Chief Health Officer, he should know enough to advise and
support the physicians, who require more of direction and
guidance than one would imagine; and among the Indians he is in
great measure responsible for the legality of their actions. In
times of epidemic he must lead.

5. He is the Chief of Indian Police.

6. He is a special deputy officer of the Liquor Service, a
branch designed for the suppression of the liquor traffic among
Indians.

7. He is Judge of the Indian Court, with the powers of a
magistrate, unless there is an intelligent Indian who may be
commissioned so to act. Such are not in the Arizona Desert. If
there should be intelligent Indians to act, the Agent has
appellate power.

8. He is the Game Warden.

9. He holds hearings, determines heirs, and probates estates.

10. He often makes allotment of lands to Indians and determines
values.

11. He is Superintendent of Indian Trade, recommends those
persons who seek Governmental license to trade with Indians at
designated trading-posts, and is expected to regulate the
prices of that trade in accordance with market conditions.

12. Should the Indians have moneys accruing from supervised
activities, such as the leasing or sale of lands, or from
stock-selling, and so on, the Agent first sets his approval on
the leases or sales, and thereafter acts as banker of the
money.

13. As banker again, he makes loans to Indians under the
Government’s reimbursable plan, whereby an Indian may purchase
of the Agent livestock, implements, materials, tools, or seed,
with borrowed money, and repay such loans during a period of
years.

14. In the Navajo country he guarantees the genuineness of the
famous Navajo blanket before it goes to market.

15. He should encourage Indian agriculture, seek to improve
their livestock holdings, and generally strengthen their
industries.

16. Under an Act of the Legislature of Arizona, he issues
marriage licenses as a clerk of the court, and may solemnize
marriage.

17. He is to see that all Indian children between the ages of
six and eighteen years attend school; to provide and equip
properly the schools; and to improve if possible the sanitary
and moral conditions of the Indian communities.

18. In some places, and the Moqui Reservation is one, he should
police and protect Indian ceremonies, such as the Snake Dance.

19. He has authority to make minor regulations in good judgment
for the government of Indian country of his jurisdiction; and
in larger measures, if he is informed and possesses a backbone,
he usually sways the policy of the Service as it affects his
people.

20. The laws of the State do not apply directly to his
territory, but serve as guides in those cases not specifically
covered by Federal law, and through him as Agent.

21. Every war-time activity was carried out by Indian Agents,
from the registration of whites and Indians, the observance of
interned aliens, through the good regulations, to bond-selling
and the application of the Income Tax.

Have you had enough?

If these are not sufficient in number to be convincing, there are a few others in the two thousand amendments issued since 1904.

A white citizen of no responsibility toward others beyond his obeying the signals of the traffic officer,—the sort who used to quarrel with belated street-cars,—and who aims to be humorous, might say, “This is not the description of a Federal official. This is none other than Pooh Bah!” Exactly so. But the Indians title him “Nahtahni” among the Navajo, “Moungwi” among the Hopi, “Ah-hin-ti” among the Spanish-speaking Pueblos of New Mexico, “Mayoro” among the Mohave, “Ah-tay-ah-pe” among the Sioux, “Ta-ta” among the Apache; to wit: Chief, or Head-man, or Father. He is no less. His rule is quite feudal and absolute.

Seldom is his authority disputed by Indians; but it is challenged and criticized by everyone else on earth, including his superiors, who, after having commissioned him with these powers, live in mortal dread that he will prove the sort of man to make use of them.

The Agent’s financial transactions are subject to audit by designated Governmental auditors, and his other official acts come under the occasional survey of inspectors. But neither of these officials has the power to take charge of affairs, or to give directions within the jurisdiction, without first having had the commissioned Agent suspended from his office.

Now here is a job sufficient in scope to occupy anyone, whatever the quality of mentality brought to bear upon it; and few who find themselves in the position go looking for a clay deposit that they may make brick in their spare time.

Naturally too, he who endeavors to meet these duties as they arise, and is surprised when he makes enemies, is one who will look stupidly for the millennium. By the very nature of things human he must expect to be viewed by some of those ruled among the Indians, by those seeking their favor or trade, by those who wish to play with them, paint them, model them, live with them, beg from them, steal from them—in short, all those who wish to use Indians or their lands and resources, as a Meddlesome Matty.

These were the late Colonel Roosevelt’s words. He took a sincere interest in Indians and their problems as administered by honest Indian Agents, and he vigorously supported such officials without considering them either meddlesome or matties, and he personally respected their regulations when visiting the reserves.

Roosevelt was an exalted Indian Agent. He had no false ideas that the common people are filled with wisdom, that capitalism oozes virtue, that labor is sincere, that poverty is an assurance of honesty. But he did believe that the poor and helpless deserved fair dealing and protection from predatory interests of whatever kind; and that the mute required a fearless voice. It was his judgment that Indian country should be governed very much in line with those suggestions made by Colonel Kit Carson, who swept rebellion out of the Painted Desert and the Moqui cañons in 1863. He who follows Carson’s advices in formulating his policy at an Agency may have trouble with his civil superiors, with politicians, with critics and tourists, and with a whole horde of people in office and out; but he will be respected by the Indians as their Chief, and in a brief time they will give him their confidence. In the end he will have their affection and loyalty.

In a report dated at Fort Lyon, Colorado Territory, August 1865, Carson replied to the questions of a Congressional Committee that sought counsel concerning the future management of the Indian:—

From a long-continued residence among or in the immediate vicinity
of Indians, and from a personal observation of their manners,
customs, and habits, acquired both in private life and the
transaction of official business as an Agent of the Federal
Government, I have been convinced that the only rule to be
successfully applied for their government is one firm, yet just,
consistent and unchangeable.

For the Indian, judging only by the effect of that which appeals to
his senses, as brought directly before his observation, regards
with contempt a weak and indecisive policy as the result of
hesitation, fear, and cowardice, whilst a changeable and capricious
one excites his apprehension and distrust. Both of these courses
should be carefully avoided.

The rule for the government of Indians should be strong enough to
inspire their respect and fear, yet protecting them from both
internal dissension and external aggression.

It is true that Carson thought this power should be vested in the military, a view that has changed among the elder statesmen without convincing anyone who knows uneducated and remotely located Indians.

Carson was right. In a brief paragraph he advised against the perfect picture of a civil Indian Service that for years has worked its political capriciousness.

It has seldom been firm; it has been most confused and unjust; it has rarely been consistent; and it is always changing.

More and worse than this—it has at times been cowardly in the face of political and private buccaneering.

Each new administration, having to pay its pressing political debts,—those debts that helped boost it into office,—must deliver the hapless Indian over to a new set of theorizing experimentalists who do not know a moccasin from a sabot. Men too small for the Cabinet, yet who have spent anxious years in log-rolling and who must be paid somehow, offer themselves eagerly to the job of guaranteeing the destiny of nations of aliens. Problems that puzzle the ethnologist and sociologist are approached without alarm, with a crude and vicious confidence, by a politician from Squawk Centre who once crossed an Indian reservation to shoot ducks.

Finding that methods current in doubtful precincts are of no avail in this work, and being forced to do something to make a showing, he proceeds to tear down the work of his predecessor, who had started in the same way but had learned a little during four years of fumbling; and when the whole works are fatuously gumbled, it must be done all over again to reach a point of normalcy, all Indians and their officers of the field marking time until the new Colonel has learned the traditions of the old barracks. Imagine John McGraw signing as pitcher some aspiring village quoit-champion! Conceive of Henry Ford halting his factories until a needy ward-heeler mastered the mysteries of a carburetor!

And the Indian, judging only by the effects of vacillation, springs to the suspicion of chicanery. The many inventions of stupid officials excite his apprehension and distrust. The Indian comprehends very little of first or political causes. When he distrusts his superiors he tends to throw himself on the hungry bosom of sentimentalists. He knows only the Agent on the ground, and too frequently finds in him a reflection of that which someone interested wants Washington to arrange. And no sooner does the Indian find an Agent who will fearlessly represent him, investigate his complaints, support his charges, and fight his just battles, and who will have nothing to do with intrigue, than he expects the removal of that uncompromising and foolish idealist to other scenes.

To-day the Hopi waits for a reasonably just settlement of his range problem, and he has been hoping for seventy-five years. He packed the trail to Santa Fe in 1850 to petition the first Indian Agent of the Americans, with the same evidence he brings patiently to his present one. The Navajo who troubles the Hopi in the west of the Empire, suffers similarly from whites on his eastern lines.

The point is that neither the Indian nor those who best know his actual condition have any direct voice in matters that affect his very existence.

XII

COMMENTS AND COMPLAINTS

The seven Moqui pueblos sent to me a deputation who presented
themselves on the sixth day of this month. Their object, as
announced, was to ascertain the purposes and views of the
Government of the United States toward them. They complained,
bitterly, of the depredations of the Navajos.—Report of James
S. Calhoun, First Indian Agent at Santa Fe, October 12, 1850

Now the Indians drifted in to greet their new Chief. Although possessed by a great curiosity, they came shyly, diffidently, as is the Indian way. One would suppose that a grand council of braves would have been called to introduce a new Agent with some semblance of formality, a thing that impresses a primitive people. But not so. The old Agent, who was agent no longer, glad that someone else had succeeded to the petty headaches which are worse than the problems, packed his gear and departed. It was up to me to meet the savage in the course of business, and to make what impression I could. There were no individual records to guide one, and first impressions are not infallible; in fact, the most serious mistakes of Agents, things that long affect their gaining the confidence of the people, come about through the necessity of accepting the Indian at his face value—a slipshod method. The census, for example, was a string of names, having little accuracy, that had not been annotated in years.

The prominent men of the several districts were not at all backward in telling me how influential they were. The Navajo came first, and with reason, for they held five-sixths of the range by right of might, and were eager to impress one that they should not be disturbed.

Came Hostin Nez, “Tall Man,” a lean, shrewd genius, who could remember the captivity after Carson’s campaigns. He stood proudly erect, and yet had an ingratiating manner that was part of his profession; for besides dominating a large faction of his people and being the hereditary chief of all the Navajo, he was a Medicine Man of high degree. Came from the north old Billa Chezzi, better known as “Crooked Fingers” because of a crippled hand, who had in him nothing that was sullen or criminal perhaps, but who pictured a bloodthirsty pirate on a desperate mission.

These two represented communities of Navajo, living and roaming north, south, east, and west of the Hopi mesa settlements, and by whom the Hopi have been throttled from the range. There were lesser men, headmen of groups or families. I remember Senegathe, “Wanderer,” with his gray hair blowing in long snaky wisps; and Scar Chin, who resembled a good-natured friar, though a long rip in his face suggested a strenuous past; and Silversmith Jim, and Yellow-Horse, and Bitani, and Whispering Bill, each having something of distinction in his manner or personal eccentricity.

But for the most part, my Navajo business was with Hostin Nez. He was a Judge of the Indian Court, and carried a “pretty paper,” a ragged commission, lithographed in bright colors. We had many a long and dispassionate argument, he rolling cigarettes in pieces of newspaper, which he evidently preferred to the “saddle-blankets” that came in packages, and wiping his lips now and then with a Turkish towel that was draped about his neck—a fashion in neckcloths that he affected. I never knew Hostin Nez to lose patience, and he would return again and again to a point at issue in the hope of gaining advantage—in appearance a Tartar chieftain, in methods a Talleyrand.

“Think of it, Nahtahni,” he said to me, very shortly after our first meeting, “I have never had a wagon. Here I am, an influential man among my people, and all the others have been favored. When the children first went to school, the Agents used to give each father a wagon; but that was years ago, and my children are men, and I never had a wagon.”

Now this was hard lines, for a Navajo who did not possess a wagon was prevented from hauling freight, at that time a most lucrative occupation, and the camp need for a vehicle of some sort was great. The Navajo has to haul wood and water, and must somehow transport his products of wool and hides to the trader. So I promised him a wagon from the next lot received.

This would not be a present. The Indians of the Empire are independent and self-supporting; they do not receive rations, and the Nahtahnis do not make presents of implements or other necessary things. The Indians paid for such issues by laboring on the roads and at other constructive work of the jurisdiction, and were credited at current rates for laborers. The “wagon” meant the issue of a full freighting outfit—everything save the horses, of which the Navajo have a surplus. He would receive a stout farm-type wagon, having top-box, bows, and cover; also harness for four horses, all at Government cost-price, about one half the figure a trader would have quoted it. And at the appointed time he would assemble from ten to twenty of his clan to labor out the bill, his followers helping him as he would in turn help them.

But Hostin Nez sent his son to sign the receipt for the issue. This was Hostin Nez Bega Number 4, indicating that there were other scions numbered one, two, and three, and perhaps even others bearing more fanciful Indian names. A great suspicion dawned on me. The issue-papers for several years back were examined, and lo! old Talleyrand had worked that game many times. He had never received a wagon; but each of his sons had received wagons after the father had made the plea for himself. When they went for freight the Nez outfit comprised a caravan, and at the scales their pay-checks totaled hundreds of dollars. Hostin Nez did not go for freight. He was the main guy, and procured the wagons!

When I taxed the Chief with this, he was not offended. He smiled benignly and repeated:

“But, Citcili” (my younger brother), “I have never had a wagon.”

We let it go at that.

Now Billa Chezzi, chief of the northern steppes, was not so clever. He was a rougher, blustering type of Indian, and lacked finesse. Once I endeavored to make a census of the Navajo, a very difficult thing of accomplishment because of their nomadism. Two enumerators cornered old Billa and insisted that he give up the details of his private life. He named six wives living, and counted forty-seven sons in various parts of the Empire. Then he said he was tired, and getting old anyway, and that his memory did not serve him as once it did. Had he followed the system of Hostin Nez, he would have crowded the Studebaker wagon-works to full capacity.

And came Kewanimptewa, chief of that third and weakest faction of the Oraibi Hopi that had nearly perished in the hills. He was a stolid fellow, not at all like his name, which signifies Chameleon. He gave me the once-over, and then said frankly:—

“Well, you are a little man—a very little man. The last one was a big man—very big man. But—perhaps you will do.”

Hardly had I moved the big desk to a place where I could see the Indians as they came in at the main door, in order that their pleas should not have to filter down through clerks, when the quiet of the summer afternoon was broken by cries of dismay and excited grief. A Navajo came running, weeping, his manner hysterical. He rushed into the office and stammered:—

“Charlie Bega, he dead—kill—Charlie Bega!”

For the moment I thought someone had been murdered; and a second thought did not lessen my dismay, for this man was a miner. His face was streaked where the tears had washed down through the smudges of coal-dust. The reservation has large deposits of soft coal, and fuel for the Government plants is mined by Indians under a skilled white miner. I had been down the mine that week, and had noted its sagging pillars under the pressure of that heavy mesa roof. It flashed through my mind that there had been a tragedy down the drift, and that other miners were either dead or entombed. But the Navajo interpreter quickly explained:—

“His son has just died. Their hogan is down the cañon near the mine, and he came to tell you of it, and he wants a coffin built and a grave dug.”

The doctor came in to confirm this statement, and added:—

“The carpenter makes coffins for the people. The Navajo have a great fear of the dead, and they will not bury when it is possible to have the work done by someone else. We usually send a squad of men to prepare a grave, and the parson conducts a little service. If you say so, I will tell him.”

It was late afternoon, and would soon be twilight.

“You may tell the carpenter,” I said to the interpreter; “we will arrange this funeral for to-morrow morning.”

“Pardon me, sir, but they have queer customs. No member of that family will eat until the body is disposed of; and they must purify themselves by sweat-baths and ceremonies. When one dies close to the Agency, we help them bury at once.”

My first inclination was not to be ruled by such superstition; and then I thought how little four centuries of progress around them and fifty years of American influence had changed the Navajo. Like his Desert, he has remained untouched, unaffected. A hogan that has held the dead is never afterward occupied by the living. Its wood will not be used to make a fire, though they come to freezing.

“Very well,” I said. “Have things made ready to-night.”

And I shall never forget my first Indian funeral. At different times since, and among other tribes and circumstances, I have had more of excitement and not a little anxiety at funerals; but this was my first in the Desert.

The carpenter made a substantial box, much too large I thought; but when the body was placed in it, wrapped in new blankets, decked with silver ornaments, with the dead boy’s saddle, bridle, and quirt at the foot, it was none too large. They could ill afford to part with those blankets and silver things, and especially that saddle. But he must be caparisoned and equipped for his new life in the ghostly land where he would go a-roaming.

A half-dozen of the employees climbed into the wagon that would carry the body to the grave. Among them was a visitor, a noted geologist who has made the Empire his study, and who took his share of labor along with the rest. The minister from the Baptist Mission met us at the gate. The burial ground was a desolate place across the arroyo, in a little hollow of those great drifted dunes, shunned by the Indians and not very inviting to anyone. By the time the grave was ready, it was quite dark and lanterns had been lighted.