Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

“Do you wish a commitment service, sir?” asked the minister. I did not at once understand him, having to learn that the new Agent decides everything, and I had thought he would take his place as the man of prayer without request. He had a short ritual for pagans, and this was one of them. It was solemn and sufficient.

“Dust to dust ...” and the tossing of earth on the box followed. Four of the men began filling in the grave. I had looked around for the relatives of the dead, but as yet none were in evidence, when out of the dusk came two strange Navajo, leading a pony. It was a very good animal as desert mounts go. And the missionary presented to me a serious problem.

“They wish to kill the horse. Will you permit that?”

And there was something in his tone of voice that indicated a hope I would deny something as an innovation. Again I called for an explanation.

“The Navajo always kill a horse at the grave,” said the trader.

“It seems a merciless thing to do—that’s a good pony.”

The missionary brightened. He had little use for pagan customs and longed for an arbitrary decision.

“It is the custom of the people,” said the trader, an honest man who advised me for many days thereafter. “You may not like it, and—you may be strong enough to stop it”—there was doubt in his voice;—“but it is their custom.”

It went against the grain; but there stood the Indians with the animal, silent, waiting. This problem had been presented to many Agents, perhaps.

“If we do not kill it mercifully with a gun, they will only go away and beat it to death with rocks,” said the trader. “It must be done to-night. I have brought a rifle.”

The desert custom of the Navajo won its first round.

The two Indians led the pony to the head of the grave, and, seeming to understand that we had settled it, scuttled away in the shadows. The trader leveled his rifle and shot that very good pony through the brain. It leaped forward convulsively, and plunged down, knee-deep, in the soft earth of the grave. The dead had a mount.

It was black night by this time, and we filed back to the Agency, where I felt better for having the electric lights. There had been something gruesome in the whole proceeding. But it was a custom of the people, as the trader had said, and in other ways I learned from him that it is not wise for a strange Chief at once to take his people by the throat.

Now the first complaints were filed with me, and soon increased to scores. The Hopi has suffered for many years because of the willful depredations of his too close neighbor, the Navajo; and the Navajo in turn has community troubles of his own. There were complaints of damage to fences, and of ruined crops, and of peeled orchards; of the stealing of ponies, and the re-branding and butchering of cattle, the pillage of houses, and the unwarranted seizure and holding of precious water-holes; complaints of domestic wrangles and social scandals, of blighted love and too ardent affections; of marriage portions and the current price of brides, of mothers-in-law—ye Gods! even of witchcraft! Descent and distribution included not only real and personal property such as we know, for came a Medicine Man claiming to have inherited the paraphernalia of a deceased tribal doctor, and requested that I decide ownership, according to the rules, in the dried head of a dead crane.

The Indian welcomes opportunity to speak his piece in court, and if permitted will promptly set up as prosecutor and spring to the rapid cross-examination of witnesses. He will even incriminate himself if there is chance of making things unpleasant for someone else; and those of the accused found guilty and sentenced invariably request a chance to peach on some other poor devil who has evaded punishment. Witchcraft seldom appears in the open, but I recall one case that was unusual.

The favorite son of a Tewa died, and the father looked about him for someone on whom to blame this calamity. Indian grief, seldom long-lived, may be the more quickly assuaged if one can fix the blame. Suddenly the bereaved father discovered that a certain neighbor was a witch. He did not like the man anyway. So, finding him prowling around the house,—urged by a sympathetic curiosity, no doubt,—the parent seized him and dragged him into the room with the dead.

“Now,” he cried, amid tears, “You see him plainer. Look at him. You are the one who killed him. You are a witch, and you sickened him with sorceries and bad medicine. Listen! When we kill anything, we always eat it. Now you eat him!”

This the alleged doctor shrank from doing, and forthwith the enraged father administered a terrific beating. The nose of this unfortunate neighbor was hammered out of all resemblance to a human organ, and other features of him were sadly damaged. They both appeared before me the next day. The father then expressed penitence and disavowed a belief in witches; but I could see that his conversion had been too rapid. In his troubled heart the witches prevailed. He seemed not to mind his sentence of a week at hard labor, having had action for his sorrow.

Having once opened a docket, the word seemed to go forth to the mesas and the cañons to bring in their complaints. The cases became legion. One would begin to examine witnesses in so simple a matter as horse-stealing and record quite a bit of evidence, to discover suddenly that the animal in question had disappeared eleven years gone, the complaint having been duly entered by seven different Indian Agents sitting at this and other Agencies. It became necessary to impose a statute of limitations.

The first real trial concerned a medicine man and his collar-bone. One Horace Greeley, of Sitchumnovi, in the First Mesa District, at that time reputed to be seventy-four years old, and by profession a bone-setter, had not pleased a member of his tribe. Or perhaps he had conjured only too well with the misplaced anatomy of the patient, and charged according to his skill. At any rate, a relative of the patient took umbrage, and proceeded to handle Horace in a rough and unseemly manner. Among other things damaged was Horace’s own collar-bone. He could not very well set this himself, and naturally distrusted his confreres; so he was forced to send for the Agency physician; otherwise I should not have heard of the case. But Horace being found with a fractured collar-bone and numerous contusions, the matter was reported, and his complaint entered for the next session of court.

The Regulations of the Indian Service direct that the Court of Indian Offenses shall consist of two or more intelligent and trustworthy Indians, acting as Judges, whose verdicts shall be reviewed by the Indian Agent, should an appeal be taken to him. As many Indians do not understand their right of appeal, the Agent is compelled to be present either to sustain or to overrule the verdicts.

And did I not have two such Judges, all properly commissioned? Did not Hostin Nez have a treasured “pretty paper,” and was not Hooker Hongave an equal Judge? Did not the Government, looking for justice, generously crowd on each of them the princely salary of seven dollars, each and every month, “fresh and fresh”? Now was the time to avail myself of native wisdom.

Judge Hooker was a figure in the First Mesa community. At one time he had been a Hopi of the Hopi, and had fought the new system of schools and school regulation with all his crude ability. To prevent his children from being enrolled, he had walled them up at home; that is, he placed them in a small room of his house, gave them food and water, and then walled up the entrance door, hoping that his fresh mortar would not arouse suspicion. To-day he is hated by pagans because he has tried to assimilate the doctrines of Christianity, and is looked on by some Christians as an arch-hypocrite. Such are the trials of the savage.

Actually he is a childish old fellow who has tried to merit the confidence of the mission folk, with little concept of where paganism ends and Christianity begins. His greatest sacrifice in life has been the abandonment of tribal ceremonies. From his house below the mesa can be seen the famous Walpi dance-ledge, like a miniature stage high in the thin air, thronged on pagan festal days with multi-colored costumes, where faintly sound the chanting and the drums. But he never attends these feasts of rhythm and song, save at the biennial Walpi Snake Dance, when he joyfully receives a dispensation from the Agent to go as an official of the Government, he being a Judge and the authorized Crier. Many times did he cry down the aimless chatter of tourists during my administration, that solemn announcements might be made to the brethren and the visitors cautioned against the making of vile photographs and unseemly levity. Garbed in a magnificently beaded waistcoat that had decked some long-vanquished Sioux warrior, and bearing his staff of office, a knotted club out of Africa, he presents a strange and not undignified figure on these occasions.

Therefore the two who shared the woolsack were contrasts. Hostin Nez, a Navajo pagan of the pagans, a Medicine Man, a leader of chants and a priest of the sand-paintings; Hooker Hongave, a simple-minded savage who had turned halfway toward the Church, with the low-toned booming of hide drums in his ears, and in his heart perhaps a longing for the mysticism of his ancient people.

The day of hearing having been reached, and all assembled, the Judges listened to the story of old broken Greeley, who had by no means recovered and was still swathed in bandages. The accused was a burly fellow under forty, powerful enough to have challenged a middleweight, who did not deny or extenuate the assault.

“It is a very bad thing this man has done,” said Judge Hooker, clucking his tongue and shaking his head sadly.

“Yes, my brother,” agreed the Navajo jurist. “It is a serious thing and it must not happen again. We must make an example of this man so all the people may know of it.”

“We will,” said Hooker; and they withdrew to frame up a sentence.

From their determined expressions I feared that friend prisoner would get at least a year in the hoosegow—an embarrassing piece of business, for the Regulations do not recognize any charge as deserving more than ninety days, and the Territorial Court had thought three years sufficient for cold-blooded murder in a recent Indian case. The judges reappeared.

“He is a bad man,” said Hooker.

“Yes, he is a dangerous fellow,” said Hostin Nez.

“And so we will send him to jail for—ten days.”

“Ten days!” I cried out. “Why, he nearly killed Greeley! That old man will suffer for weeks. You mean ten weeks, don’t you?”

“No,” they said. “Ten days is a long time in jail.”

The appellate power came into action.

“Your decision, gentlemen, is overruled.”

Hooker brightened, expecting a remission of at least five days, which would save his face at the mesa and perhaps prevent the prisoner from hating him for many years.

“The prisoner will be confined for the period of sixty days, and during that time he will be employed at hard labor.”

Hooker gasped, trembled, and was speechless.

“You are a man without mercy,” declared old Hostin Nez.

That was my last session of the Indian Court in the Hopi-Navajo country with native judges sitting. One might as well expect justice from a goose.

For an Agent who wishes to evade responsibility, the “judges” are an excellent smoke-screen. He can always say—“It was done by the prisoner’s own people”: Pilate’s method. Aside from its having all the elements of farce, it breeds dissatisfaction and ill will among the people, while teaching them nothing. I know of nothing more unjust, unless it be the trial of an unlettered Indian according to the strict letter of white man’s law and the unwavering standard of the white man’s boasted morality.

Thereafter I paid the salaries, and pleasantly chatted with the old gentlemen when they visited the Agency; but of their legal wisdom I wanted nothing. The Court proceeded to business without them.

So large an area of country, nearly four thousand square miles, occupied by two dissimilar tribes and these ancient enemies, should have some measure of control. The police force I found consisted of three individuals, two Navajo and one lonesome Hopi. The Agent had found things so peaceful that he did not need police; which is one way of saying that he did not bother himself about policing the Empire. And when the first serious bit of police work became necessary, after five years of peaceful neglect, the War Department, at the request of the Secretary of the Interior, detailed one hundred and twenty-five men of the Twelfth Cavalry as an “escort” to Colonel Hugh L. Scott. This officer of long experience at Indian diplomacy was sent to review the situation and conditions. The work completed, he recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that the Indian Agent should have a force of not less than twenty men, in charge of a white officer. The Department, therefore, being unable totally to ignore the opinion of the famous Colonel Scott, increased my police to eight men, all natives, and left me to whatever success I could contrive. In 1921 Major-General Hugh L. Scott told me that he had not changed his opinion.

The Hopi do not make good policemen, and certainly not in a cohort of one. Their very name implies “the peaceful ones.” Their towns are ruled largely by pueblo opinion. If a resident acquires the reputation of being unreasonable and unfeeling, as a policeman often must, his standing in the outraged community may affect all other phases of his life. Therefore the Hopi is not likely to become a very zealous officer when operating alone. And too, the Hopi fear the Navajo, as it is said the Navajo fear the Ute, and are useless when removed from the neighborhood of their homes.

But many years ago, when the Hopi were sorely pressed by nomad enemies and had not even the consolation of telling their woes to an Indian Agent, they sent emissaries to their cousins, the Pueblo Indians of what is now New Mexico, and begged for a colony of warriors to reside with them. In response to this plea, and looking for something to their advantage, in 1700 came a band of the Tewa from Abiquiu on the Chama River, from that section where Onate found San Juan de los Caballeros. To these people the Hopi granted a wide valley west of the First Mesa, known as the Wepo Wash, providing they would stay and lend their prowess in future campaigns. They built a village atop the First Mesa, now called Tewa or Hano, where their descendants live to-day. Some intermarried with the Hopi, and a few with the near-by Navajo; but they have not been absorbed, and it is a curious fact that while all the Tewa speak Hopi and Navajo with more or less fluency, after two centuries of living side by side few of the Hopi can speak the Tewa dialect.

The Hopi invited warriors, and the warriors have graduated into policemen, for one learns to police the Hopi districts, and even to discipline some of the Navajo, with Tewa officers. They are dependable and courageous, even belligerent; that is to say, they will fight when it is necessary and, strange thing among desert Indians, with their fists, taking a delight in blacking the opponent’s eye. But one has to learn that the Hopi as policemen are fine ceremonial dancers.

The Navajo cohort had been selected following a frontier fallacy. Many of the old Agents believed that a good police force could be built from the “bad men” of the community.

“The cattle-thief will know all other cattle-thieves,” was their reasoning. “The gambler will not be deceived as to those who waste their herds and silver playing monte. And the meaner an Indian among his own, the more respect and fear he will stimulate when garbed in a uniform and authorized to pack a gun.”

As reasonable as if New York officials should make a special deputy of Gyp the Blood.

Hoske Yega, commonly known as Old Mike, a tall and unscrupulous Navajo, carried the Chief’s badge. It was said that he had killed more than one man; and while I am not so sure of this, certainly he was no example of righteousness. The second officer was not so mean a specimen, but one of the same system. They had been policemen of the jurisdiction for many years, believed themselves entitled to the positions, and knew the game. A Navajo policeman has nothing to learn from the bulls of the whites as to methods of graft and the blackmailing use of his badge. The Indian Service has used native police since 1878, and I will admit that occasionally one finds a jewel of an officer, of good judgment, trustworthy, brave, and loyal; but for the most part the Indian policemen of the Desert are go-betweens and grafters.

Providing that the Indian accused of wrongdoing is not of the policeman’s clan, providing that the policeman is not afraid of him or of his clan, providing that there is no witchcraft involved, the Navajo policeman can serve a warrant and get his man as quickly and as unerringly as any Sherlock Holmes. A skilled tracker, he can read the trail as an open book; and often he does not need to follow it. Indians leave their visiting cards behind them. My first knowledge of this came when the corral of Clezzi Thlani was relieved of several good ponies, and Old Mike was sent forth to investigate. He recovered most of the stock from the open range, and reported:

“They were taken by Sageny Litsoi.”

Sageny’s idea had been the common one among Navajo, dating from wagon-train days: to run the ponies a little further each night until distance had convinced him that he actually owned the animals. Then a little tinkering with a hot wire would so confuse brands as to bring even the records to his support.

“Why didn’t you bring him in?” I asked.

“Didn’t see him—just got the horses.”

“Then how do you know that Sageny is the thief?”

“Went to corral; saw his tracks. Yisconga dahtsi” (to-morrow perhaps) “I bring in Sageny.”

“You mean the trail will lead to his hogan?”

“No, No! Went to corral; see his tracks—Sageny’s feet. No two Navajo have feet alike.”

And when Sageny was brought in, although he had many excuses and claimed that he had raised the animals, he did admit taking animals having another’s brand; and he occupied the guardhouse for a period as a guest of the Empire. Several of my Navajo police graduated later into the same rest-room, which seemed a humorous proceeding to many, and was not altogether different from the experiences of some white lieutenants.

It was when I discovered that Tewa could be depended on that better police-work followed. The point of view was different. One day I summoned the tall and spare Tewa chief of police, and said to him:—

“Nelson, I want Hostin Chien Bega. You know him?”

“Yes; me know him—call him ‘Bull-Neck.’”

“‘Bull-Neck’ it is. Can you bring him in?”

“Dahtsi.”

“Well, here are handcuffs. Suppose you try it.”

He took the cuffs and walked away. A short time after he returned, and I saw that he had buckled on his guns.

“You want ‘Bull-Neck,’” he commented. “He mean Navajo—carry two guns all the time. Sometimes bring in whiskey. Now, how bad you want him? You want him dead?”

Well, to be plain about it, I did not want Hostin Chien Bega, alias Bull-Neck, as a morgue exhibit. He was mean enough in the flesh. And I foresaw the later experience of a brother superintendent who ruled the reservation on my west line. His domain was if anything a trifle wilder than mine, reaching to the Grand Cañon and the most remote places of the Utah border. Its area was a trifle more than five thousand square miles, inhabited by at least six thousand Navajo, many of whom had never touched civilization. One Taddytin had graduated from the police force into a bully of the countryside, and it became necessary to impose on him a bit of his own medicine. Taddytin was a giant in physique and quite the meanest man of that territory. Messages summoning him to the Agency were of no avail. He pleaded illness, that cover to which retreat all those who do not wish to testify. Taddytin not only resisted the persons sent to arrest him, but did his level Navajo best with a .45 gun to get them before they subdued him. The Navajo is quite handy with a gun at close range. Most of them go armed from the time they make money enough to purchase a heavy weapon at the nearest trading-post—a trade permitted by the Indian Office, although in utter defiance of both Federal and Arizona State law.

The affair came off in a hogan, which is entirely too restricted a place for serious shooting. Taddytin’s gun twice missed fire, and the persons sent to arrest him, having been in line with the gun, became nervous and, strange to relate, lost their judgment. They should have reprimanded Taddytin for carrying a defective weapon. Instead, they felt it necessary to shoot Taddytin several times, and although not using one of those fancy .22’s that O. Henry was wont to ridicule, the first two bullets failed to knock him down. Unfortunately the last shot killed Taddytin, which was entirely opposed to all policies of moral suasion.

My brother superintendent, who acts as Indian Agent no longer, defended himself in the Federal Court, first against a murder charge, and then one of perjury, from the Spring term of 1916 to and including the Spring term of 1918. He stood quite alone, save for the testimony of all those who knew anything about Indians and Taddytin in particular. It cost him quite four thousand dollars in cash, to say nothing of time and mental disturbance. The full history of this case may be found in a Congressional Report (House Doc. 1244) to accompany H.R. Bill No. 5639, dated September 19, 1922—a bill to reimburse the man after his persecution had ended; a report that is probably forgotten. According to that report, the superintendent, acting as Indian Agent—

did not receive the support from the Indian Bureau in connection
with this matter to which he was entitled, but instead he was
vigorously, and your committee believes unjustly, prosecuted by the
Federal authorities.

You see, the superintendent became the official goat, and suffered that a glowing policy of big wind and puffery might not be embarrassed.

As this affair occurred to my next-door neighbor, it had a serious effect on law-and-order conditions within my by no means peaceful jurisdiction, to the end that I was once reported as murdered and often threatened with having the report confirmed.

No; I did not urge my Tewa policeman to give a too realistic picture of loyalty to my commands.

XIII

A DESERT VENDÉE

One noticeable thing about all the Calhoun letters is the
complaint of inadequate support from Washington.—Abel:
Correspondence of James S. Calhoun

It was a hot sweltering desert day in July when I proceeded westward from Oraibi to survey for the first time the contentious pueblo of Hotevilla, Chief Youkeoma’s retreat. I did not expect to meet this strange personality, but his very name caused me to have an interest in so rare a character: You-ke-o-ma, or “something quite nearly complete”—as one might say, “almost perfection.” An American Dalai Lama.

Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone. To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from the masses of tumbled sandstone.

The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of deep sand, and more of rock outcroppings, and then appeared the fields of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food. The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.

The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site. Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle, few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth.

There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger to feel a trifle less than comfortable.

“Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my companion.

“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They knew when you arrived at Oraibi yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you left the Agency and started out this way.”

All of which proved to be true, and I had later to learn to circumvent and deceive such mysterious methods of information.

We sat on a baking sand-hill and surveyed the place. It was simply a dirtier duplicate of the other pueblos I have described, without their picturesque setting. And if there is a place in America where aroma reaches its highest magnitude, then that distinction must be granted Hotevilla on a July afternoon. The sun broils down on the heated sand and rock ledges, on the fetid houses and the litter and the garbage, and all that accumulates from unclean people and their animals. Multitudes of burros and chickens and dogs. Hosts of dogs. Lank, slinking, half-starved, challenging dogs. Poisonous-looking dogs that would attack one.

Hotevilla’s sloping streets end at the mesa-edge, and below are the sacred spring and their sunlit fields. Far away in the northwest, as a dim blue sail on the horizon, showed Navajo Mountain, that peak of Indian mystery where the last of their secrets have found refuge. The Hopi had migrated from that country centuries past, south to the Little Colorado River; and then, like the back-wash of a wave, had drifted and settled in his present place of stagnation. Perhaps Hotevilla had proved his Promised Land.

The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony odor,—although it may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent, with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.

At one end of the village, and a little apart from it, stood a house with a peaked roof. This had been the station of the Mennonite Mission, but when last threatened, the good people departed. It required a brave spirit to live close to the hostile Hopi. One was likely to reflect on the fate of Fray Padre José de Espeleta, of the Kingdom of Navarre, and the difference in theological teaching lent very little comfort.

Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her, and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself, perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was because of his threatening this woman.

When it grew near to sunset the men began returning from the fields, plodding in with their sacks and staves and huge planters’ hoes. Many of them were aged, their long hair matted and snaky-looking; but there were enough of the burly, thickset fellows to give any official pause if he contemplated dictating to that outfit. Even those who closely observe these people wonder at this evidence of physique. The Hopi lives largely on a vegetable diet. His teeth are blunted and worn down like a horse’s from the eating of flint-like corn. Because of isolation and clan ceremonial exclusion they have become devitalized through centuries of inbreeding, and quickly succumb to disease. And yet these same Hopi are famed for two things requiring raw strength and sustained energy: they can lift and pack on their backs the heaviest burdens, and they are great long-distance runners. Many of their ceremonies include the foot race, notably the sunrise competition on the day of the Snake Dance. Given a long desert course, fifty to one hundred miles, and the Hopi runner will wear down a horse. Their ability to bear burdens comes from both sides of the house, since for ages the women have packed water from the springs to the heights, and the men the harvests, the firewood, and the rock for building. I have seen two moving piles of wood on a mesa-trail, to discover one a burro-load and the other covering a man, with small difference between them.

And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who built a huge mission atop their penal height, the beams coming from San Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles. One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.

Especially would an official pause in dictation at the time of which I speak, for the Hopi had defied two former superintendents and for several years had done exactly as they pleased, in utter disregard of all admonitions emanating by mail from Washington. Of course official Washington had not worried, and for the rest of the world the Hopi do not exist; but the example to about fifteen hundred other and disciplined Hopi and to several thousand unregulated and undisciplined Navajo, all in constant touch with these rebels, was not good. The Agents reaped the effect of this timid policy, and it had given them concern.

The Hopi had so acted at other times, and the methods adopted to correct them had not been of the happiest. Officials had threatened and, when the native did not stir, had offered bribes.

“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been given to bluffing, and buying.

The Indian Service had not greatly concerned itself about these strange people until 1887. Between 1847, when the Hopi were acquired as one of the blessings of the Mexican War, and 1887, when the first school was planted in Keams Cañon—forty years—they had lived practically as undisturbed as since their coming from the cliff- and cavern-dwellings in the northern cañons of the Utah border. A few traders had visited them often enough to be known; and one of them, Mr. John Lorenzo Hubbell, has told me of his witnessing a Snake Dance in the seventies, a solitary white spectator where now several thousands congregate annually. The tourist was not in those days, and had he been, under the circumstances of the back-country, it is likely he would have been going away from a Snake Dance rather than attending one.

In 1890 the defiance of the Oraibi first caused notice. Old Lo-lo-lo-mi, their good chief, had been to Washington, and had agreed to place the children of his faction in the school. His counsels were disregarded by the opposition; in fact they imprisoned the old man and threatened him with death for this lapse from the traditions. Lo-lo-lo-mi was “too good,” as his name implied. The sub-Agent, Mr. Ralph Collins, arrested several of the war-chiefs and sent them to their Agent at Fort Defiance. When they returned they busied themselves making more trouble; so troops were sent to pacify and coerce them, and the first great blunder was made by an army officer. This officer accompanied Collins to the Oraibi mesa. They were warned that the hostiles had armed and meant to fight. Believing this to be so much bluff, they ascended the mesa to the pueblo. A war-chief, who had refused to attend a council, stepped out on one of the terraced houses. He was painted for the occasion, carried a rifle, and looked the part of his office. He was joined by a medicine man, who wore a raw sheepskin that dripped blood and besmeared his body. These two, knowing of many sympathizers within the hovels, dared the whites to combat and greatly abused them. The two white men prudently retired after an abortive parley.

Then came five troops of cavalry. The commanding officer invited the hostile headmen to a council below the mesa, and gave his word that they should be respected. They came, but stubbornly refused to change their minds as to this white man’s educational propaganda. They were then seized and bound as prisoners; and were afterward marched up the pueblo trail as a screen for the soldiers. This was rank betrayal, and the effects of it live in the Oraibi country to this day.

“Some white men do not keep their word.” And at Oraibi, or at least among unreconstructed Oraibans, who are now at Hotevilla, it is wisdom to suspect all white men.

Collins, the civilian and sub-Agent, had no part in this. He advised against it and deplored it. It would have been better to risk a bit of bad marksmanship, for which the Hopi is noted; it would have been better to beat a few worthless war-chiefs and medicine men to death, if that were actually necessary. One can forgive a battle—but betrayal rankles in the heart.

The prisoners taken at this time were sent to Fort Wingate. In a few months they were released on promise to be good, but when they returned from captivity they too refused to keep the parole given. The goose of an officer had produced a flock of ganders, and his work was to live for nearly three decades. In 1894 troops were again in demand at Oraibi, and nineteen of the Indian leaders were sent as prisoners to Alcatraz Island. They were imprisoned about eight months, and returned impenitent.

In 1898 the Hopi suffered from smallpox. It was not so bad as that epidemic told of by the Spanish, but it was severe enough. Superstition and fright, combined with fatalism, are hard things to conquer among a people who know nothing of vaccination, who trust no stranger, but prefer to die unassisted by aliens. Troops were necessary, to affect quarantine and to cremate bodies. In 1899, say the records, troops came again, and once more prisoners were sent to Fort Defiance.

All this time internal dissension was at work among the Oraibans, and in 1905 differences as to the views of local oracles concerning the traditions reached a climax. This quarrel involved nearly everyone within reaching distance. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis E. Leupp, the best supporter of discipline the Service has had in three decades, was at odds with his Agent on this station and, to tell the truth, this Agent had met one Waterloo at the Chimopovi pueblo, where an outpost of the Oraibi dwelt. His effort to coerce the Hopi with an enlarged Navajo police force had nearly resulted in bloodshed and real war; and at the end of this fiasco the Navajo mercenaries threatened his life because the pay-chest was not promptly thrown open to them.

So the Commissioner came to exert a strong personal influence. And he found speedily that his personal influence in the great Desert amounted to very little. The Indians had a keen sense of the fitness of things, and they resented his appearing to negotiate with them without an official sponsor.

“Who are you?” asked the troubled Oraibi, when invited to a council with him.

“I am the Commissioner from Washington,” he stated, a fact that was known to President Roosevelt, the Grid-iron Club, and the New York Evening Post, and that should have been patent everywhere.

“Why do you come here without Moungwi, then?” they demanded. “He should introduce you to us. We do not know you. Moungwi is not here. Why do you come in the back way, from Winslow, and call a council without Moungwi?”

Indians are often peculiarly consistent. They did not regret that recent fracas with Moungwi, when they had seized him by the beard and threatened to toss him bodily from the gigantic Chimopovi cliffs,—action prevented only by his Navajo police threatening to open fire,—but they did know something of official courtesy between and among all Moungwis or Chiefs, and there is such a thing as having the proper entrée, even with an Indian tribe in the far-removed hills. Very likely the Commissioner said something about the respect due his office; when arose a big Indian, who declaimed to this astonishing effect:—

“This man comes here alone, and he has a crooked mouth. His words go two ways. He is no Commissioner of Indian Affairs, or the Moungwi would be here to tell us. I myself saw this man working with a shovel on the railroad section-gang not three weeks ago. Don’t listen to him. He will lead you the wrong trail.”

Now this was a terrible blow to dignity, and hurt all Washington. Matters did not improve, and by 1906 the trouble had increased to the point where troops were necessary once again. They came. They rehearsed their parts perfectly, and prisoners were taken. A special inspector was sent in to observe matters, and he found himself in a very embarrassing position. The one hundred captives had arranged a hunger strike. Receipts for their prison mess-equipment had been demanded of them, in strict accordance with the farcical methods of accounting then in vogue. The true Hopi hostile, loyal to high-priest Youkeoma, has never signed for anything. He is reared to be wary of the white man’s papers. As he cannot read them for himself, he classes everything in the nature of a document along with the white man’s word, as illustrated by the first army officer who betrayed him.

“If they won’t sign, let them starve,” said the soldier in this case, and he was not at all worried about it. But the special inspector was very much worried about it. He had to be more careful of his civil job; so he managed early one morning, with the seductive aroma of boiling coffee and the alluring scent of fried bacon, to develop a hungry Judas among the younger men, who signed for the whole lot; and lo! by such means all tribulation was avoided.

This time seventeen leaders were sent to Fort Huachuca, seventy-two were put to work on the roads of the reserve, and a lot of younger men, rebels in embryo, were dispatched to distant Indian schools, in the belief that enforced education would bring calm to their troubled spirits. Eight of these young men went to Carlisle. I had to deal with them when they returned, some seven years later. In fact, the Commissioner of that time advised me that they would prove a help in administering the affairs of the reservation. They returned arrayed in the clothing of the white man, but only three of them showed any signs of repentance. Those of the Hotevilla, with one exception, shucked the clothing promptly and went back to the blanket. They were sullen and suspicious, and they had not lost their memories.

I did not blame them in great measure, for at least four had been married men when taken from the pueblo. Their wives now had other consorts, other children. The children of the rebel fathers would not forgive them, because they repudiated the faithless wives. The fathers blamed the Government for not protecting their households. And the women said to me:—

“You took our men. We were left alone. We had to keep the children alive, and this meant tending the fields and the sheep. Speak not to us of morals.”

At least that was the English meaning of their argument and reproof, whatever the Hopi terms of it. Quite so many “’Lispeths”: “You are all liars, you English”; and in the same manner their sons and daughters took to their “own unclean people savagely.”

Now a tribal marriage is a legal marriage, or so the courts have decreed, of course far removed from the haunts of the alien and having no specific knowledge of him or of his conditions. So, in strict accordance with sacred property rights and the Great Book of Platitudes, it was my duty to say to the outfit assembled: “You, hussies, are guilty of adultery, and many of your children are illegitimate; while you, impenitent rebels, may not take other wives, since by so doing you would commit bigamy; and each of you, every one, all and several, to wit, should have long terms in the guardhouse.”

That is what I should have said; but being of sound mind, and having very little use for platitudes, especially those courageously hurled by mail across two thousand miles, I did nothing of the sort. I had a convenient place in which I kept the sacred book hidden, and had trained myself into a complete forgetfulness of it.

But notwithstanding my sympathies, I could never soften the hatred of one of the sons. He hated his father because of his mother’s treatment, and above all this he hated white men, including me. The stupid sins of one Moungwi are inherited by another in the line of succession.

“You took my father,” he said to me, “and left my mother to work hard in the fields; and when I grew big enough to work you took me to school, so she was left again without help. Then, when my father returned from Carlisle, he would have nothing to do with my mother. And you would not let me go home to her. I have no use for these ways of the white men. I will not cut my hair, and I do not agree to continue at school. You are strong enough to make me, but I will not do these things for you.”

He could tell me this in straight English, as at my desert school he had received a good grammar foundation; and he was not interrupted or punished, because I encouraged the pupils to come to me and speak their minds. But, being stronger, I elected to do these things for him, having in mind his individual interests as separate and apart from the feuds of the past; but I could not severely blame him for his stubborn opposition. He was a very bright lad, and became an exceptional student; but just as surely he returned finally to his “own unclean people, savagely.” Three weeks on the roads, breaking stone and wheeling sand, would have done more to cure that father’s rebellious attitude than those years at Carlisle, exiled from his household and all of life that he understood and cared for. To be sure,—and to be fair to his instructors,—the man learned a great deal at Carlisle, which was a very fine school; and more than this, he saw the wonders of the white man. He was one of the first to witness an air flight. And when he told his ancients at the pueblo of these strange and unbelievable things he had seen in Philadelphia, they arose in wrath, knocked out their ceremonial pipes, and denounced him as the greatest liar unhung. So even by the elders, whose lost cause he had espoused and suffered for, he was repudiated and damned. Few patriots get such treatment as this. He was completely ostracized at home. To keep him in food, I employed him as a local policeman, hoping he would revenge himself; but this commission brought him only additional scorn and reprobation. For long he lived at Hotevilla as a pelican in the desert; where else could he live? Was it not home?

But we had reached 1911, with the same old situation burning on the Oraibi mesa, save that the hostiles were now in a pueblo of their own, and could be dealt with, however justly or unjustly, without affecting those who had never actively resisted the Government. It was sheer nonsense to begin again the farce of supplication and argument, of cheap bribes and equally impotent threats. No bones had “bleached in the sun,” and there were not enough native police and loyal employees to risk an attempt at coercing this sullen horde. I returned to the Agency and wrote a very impolitic report. Anything of truth that the Indian Bureau does not wish to know is impolitic.

I recited the facts, and recommended, as the Government had found it necessary to send in troops so many times before, and always after much backing and filling and abortive negotiation,—all to the amusement of the savage,—why not send troops now, and quickly. This recommendation was dated July 28, 1911.

Government moves with a truly fearsome swiftness. I realize now, after thirteen years of report-swapping and buck-passing, that some miracle happened in that my suggestion was considered at all. I have been told that a friend assured the Secretary of the Interior that I was not a maniac. But it required until September 27, 1911 to request the Secretary of War to detail cavalry from a distant point, when troops were idle at Fort Apache only one hundred and eighty miles away—quite in the neighborhood, as desert spaces are considered. Another month drifted by, and on October 28 the Secretary of War detailed Hugh L. Scott, then Colonel in rank, as an officer of Indian experience likely to have influence with these strange people. Under date of November 15 I was directed to coöperate with Colonel Scott, and as no allowance was made for the fact that it was winter and mails likely to be delayed along the one hundred and five miles of wagon-transport, the great Indian diplomatist and his officers and men reached the Moqui Agency before my orders. Four months had been devoted to the delicate untwisting of red tape that a telephone conversation between Departments and a telegram to the nearest post would have settled in twenty-four hours’ time. How comfortable if those Hopi had been Ute, Apache, Navajo, or Sioux!

XIV

SOLDIERS, INDIANS, AND SCHOOLS

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health
to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles,
and he weareth the Christian down.

—Kipling

If you seek information on an Indian Reservation concerning things outside the line of routine, never ask the Agent in charge. He will have the important papers locked away from prying eyes, and will likely comment that it is none of your business. Why invite this rebuff? Go to the mess-cook, the farrier, or the seamstress. They will have had all the essential details from some other post, from a mess-cook, a farrier, or a seamstress, who will have zealously garnered it from some leaky official, or mayhap from the telegraph operator. Who told Sitting Bull that Custer had divided his command? By long odds, it was a camp cook.

And when the school disciplinarian asked me one morning, as he was checking his watch with my chronometer, “When do you expect the troops?” I knew that an unusual order had issued. He was correct in his assumption, for the laundress had been notified. Now I do not presume to assert that the Secretary of the Interior had notified the laundress—but she knew. Perhaps some other laundress had found the order in the Colonel’s wash. Anyway, the column arrived just when she predicted.

It made a striking picture filing down the long Cañon hill-road, black riders against the sky and yellow sand, the field flag and troop pennant fluttering; and there was about it a certain campaign note that caused as much consternation throughout the back country as if war had been declared, with Kit Carson back in the saddle.

Those of the wavering Hopi who lived apart from Youkeoma but leaned toward his policies when they dared, and who had been awaiting developments, began to rush their belated children to the schools. The smiling “friendlies” industriously continued minding their home affairs. And the Navajo, after one excited survey from the opposite mesa-wall, completely disappeared from the landscape. Not a Navajo was to be seen about the Agency for a very long period. Their old chiefs, such as Hostin Nez and Billa Chezzi, could recall the captivity at the Bosque Redondo, and the younger men had heard them tell of it. This was no time for argument with the Nahtahni, and while they had lost nothing in the back country, still it invited a peaceful hegira far from the tents and bugles of that column.

The whole affair was against all tradition. Three former Agents had argued and threatened and waited in vain, and the third had lingered helplessly at his post until revolt blazed out to singe his beard. Now this new Nahtahni had said very little; in fact, he had seemed depressed and a trifle bewildered. But here came the soldiers, a very different sort of Se-lough from those three uniformed natives he was thought to depend on. The effect was immediate and lasting. And more than one official, having actual knowledge of conditions among the isolated Navajo, has agreed with me that such a column should file through that country every little while. There would be in both Indians and white men more of respect for the orders of the Government, and fewer murders in lonely places.