Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

And it came to pass that I was sent to another post. My last official act as a Moungwi was the dismissing of Youkeoma. Our differences would not affect the success of a newcomer. We shook hands this time, pleasantly, and he smiled. I asked him for no promises, and preached him no sermon. He departed down the Cañon afoot, for his hike of forty-odd miles. Quite likely he would stop that night with his married daughter at the settlement of the Five Houses, a Christian family, and the next night with Sackaletztewa on the Chimopovi cliffs. He was too old to make the journey in true Hopi fashion, jogging tirelessly. I venture that he did not visit his hereditary rival, Tewaquaptewa, at the original stronghold of his people—Oraibi had slipped too far from the traditions. But I would like to have witnessed his entry into Hotevilla in the sunset, a tired old man, but steadfast in spirit and unconquered, and to have heard the talk at that first all-night conference of the ancients in the kiva.

In 1921 I visited the Agency; and lo! he was in the guardhouse again. He was squatted on the floor, sifting a pan of flour for the prison-mess, his old trade. He looked up, to recognize me with a whimsical, not unwelcoming smile.

“Hello!” he said, “You back?”

When I saw him last, he was talking to Major-General Hugh L. Scott, who had spent ten days listening to him ten years before. Youkeoma was again reciting the legend of the Hopi people. Many things had happened in those wild and unreasonable ten years. The world had suffered discord and upheaval; merciless war had lived abroad and bitter pestilence at home. Nations had quite lost identity, and individuals had become as chaff blown to bits in the terrible winds. Scott had heard the great guns roar out across Flanders. Nearly everything had changed except the Desert—and Youkeoma.

He was the same unwavering fanatic, “something nearly complete,” a gnome-like creature that would have better fitted dim times in the cavern cities of the Utah border, where his cliff-dwelling forbears built and defended Betatakin, and Scaffold House, and the Swallow’s Nest. In those wild days of the Dawn he would have been an evil power; but now he was simply a belated prophet without honor in his own country, one who had set his face against progress, and whose medicine had failed. Quite lonely too, for most of his followers had drifted from him.

But miserable and impotent as he seemed, and perverted as he proved, we somehow admire steadfastness of purpose and the driving will that does not flinch under adversity. This Youkeoma of Hotevilla was not malicious. He was simply a deluded old savage, possessed by the witches and katchinas of his clan, living in a lost world of fable. A Ghost-and-Bird chief. The last of the Hopi caciques. A faint echo of the Desert Dawn-Men.

XVI

FIDDLES AND DRUMS

For you and I are past our dancing days.—Romeo and Juliet.

Having had charge of the Hopi for a longer period than any other official of the United States Government,—eight years and two months, to be exact,—I venture to picture them and their empire. To have visited and counseled with them, to have wrangled with them, to have traveled long distances in all sorts of weather because of their childish factional quarrels; to have arrested and judged and disciplined them; even married them,—if that may be separately classed,—to have cared for them in severe illnesses and advised in times of stress; to have ransomed them from enemies; to have espoused their uninteresting cause in the face of Departmental opposition; and when their meagre business of living was over to have buried them—well, this ought to embrace an angle of vision.

Yet, I hesitate. Reflection cautions me that this may be presumption; for, after all, what do I know of the Hopi Indians?

During those eight long years I met on the reservation thousands of visitors—students and their mentors; painters and etchers and sculptors of distinction, and those who thought they were; photographers and lens-artists; ethnologists, philologists, and sociologists; ballyhoo men from Eastern department-stores and half-wits taking an outing; journalists and authors and publishers; geologists and common “water-witches”; motion-picture men and others wearing puttees; actors and lecturers; composers, musicians, and vocalists; museum scouts and “scratchers”; clergymen and soldiers; Oxford men, Harvard men, men from Bonn; retired statesmen and unretiring politicians; representatives of foreign governments; persons from the far-famed city of New York; tourists, and caparisoned dudes, and simple guides; plain gentlemen and plainer roughnecks.

Some of them sought me out courteously to explain their missions, some of them just happened to see me en passant, and a few earnestly avoided me. The permit system was very irksome to those who did not have a good excuse. And I listened to many theories concerning the Hopi and their curious customs, and I made a brave effort to answer in some pleasant manner ten thousand questions. Finally, I prepared a plea in avoidance:—

“Don’t ask me. I have lived here only six years. Ask the chap camped now at the trader’s post—he came last week.”

I plagiarized this method from a brother superintendent who knew much of the Navajo and their rare designs in weaving.

“Now, my dear Mr. Shelton,” the tourist would ask hopefully, “Doesn’t that sign indicate the rabbit-foot following the lightning?”

“Make up your own story,” he would gravely reply, “and then you won’t forget it.”

So with Hopi secrets. The little of their history that is known I have already related. The rest is speculation. The believed facts of their ethnology may be had in Smithsonian Reports, moisture proof, dessicated. The bones of their ceremonies have been diagrammed and painted, their chants recorded in scaled notebooks, their odd ceremonial objects looted and catalogued. Sentimental word-pictures one can procure from those journalists who flitted rapidly in and out seeking impressions, and who never failed to get them.

But I am not one whit more ignorant than any other white man. Despite reams of theories, no one has learned anything of Hopi lore that the Hopi did not want him to know. “Make up your own story, and you won’t forget it.” When certain Christianized worthies of the tribe have pretended to expose their knowledge, I have paid little attention, since I knew the mental calibre of such fellows before conversion, and the depth of their gray matter was never impressive. The last who gave evidence proceeded well in his story until, with a foreign fervor, he began to lie about the Oraibi happenings within my own time, and as I had taken his testimony under oath in Hopi trials, I knew just how many Bibles to trust him on.

Moreover, being the recognized Moungwi or Chief of the Hopi, and having some instinctive conception of the manner in which an alien and suspicious people should be governed, I respected their privacy and reticence, to gain and hold their own respect. One cannot play with an Indian in the morning, and expect to summon him to judgment after noon. The poorest stick of an Indian Agent I have seen is he whom Indians address by his first name, or familiarly without a title. When one lowers himself to an alien’s social level, he seldom achieves more than the privilege of dipping his food out of the same dish. It was my job to manage all things for their best interests, against their strenuous efforts otherwise if that were necessary—as it often was; and I hoped to restore to them a confidence in white men, whereas they had come to believe that all white men were a mixture of abnormal curiosity and treachery, coupled with an astounding rudeness.

As for their psychology, no itinerant will ever grasp the subtlety of these people. It is something elemental and therefore indescribable. Those who have lived among Asiatics will know what I mean. Fatalists, they are as patient and immutable as the Pleiades. Much of this is vanishing with the elders as they wend their ways from the mesa stages to the Great Place of Ceremonies that Youkeoma has told me of. The pastoral peace and solemnity of the desert shrines is passing before the roar of motors and the harangues of “dude wranglers.”

Now I remember a curious red-haired visitor who came into the Agency one drowsy afternoon, herding a squad of burros. He looked a figure from a Conrad novel, and would have graced any one of them. His animals were packed with matting hampers having an Oriental touch. His flaming head was bare to the summer sun, his worn and rusty boots of cordovan preceded war-time styles and spoke of long journeys. The seat was absent from his trousers. An astonishing man.

His first question of me was: “Who is the new French Premier?”

It just happened that I could tell him. He handed me his credentials, and I found that this dilapidated tramp represented the French Government in his wanderings after strange cacti and other plant life. He strewed the contents of his hampers over my quarters and forgot to sort the wreckage for a week. Meantime—in my bath—he was analyzing Hopi corn and rare Indian dyes.

And he related to me strange things. He had been to Lhasa with the Younghusband expedition. He said that the Hopi were duplicates of the Tibetans, and that he believed the languages contained similarities. That fellow knew how to reach the heart of a secretive people. He had procured seventeen distinct varieties of Hopi corn, and other seed, as well as old dye-formulæ and samples of ceremonial cotton.

“Zey call me, ze man wi’ ze burros,” he said, naïvely.

You see, he had walked in on their level, prodding his patient beasts, covered with the desert dust, a wondrous simplicity on his face. He had touched the Hopi heart. He could have told one things of the Hopi people—but the opening guns of the Great War summoned him away to die at Verdun.

Know ye the trail that the Salt bands go?
Close by the Rock where they carved their names?
Know ye the hills of the Navajo
And the barren sands that the Hopi claims?
Dim in the cañons of the dead,
Where the towns are dust and the last scalp dried,
Their swords are rust, and the desert crow
Scarce can tell where the Spaniard died.
Slain at Zuni and Cañon de Chelly, [2]
By the Mesa Black and at Santa Fe;
One of them killed by a Pecos clown,
One of them dropped by Walpi town.

—Song of the Spanish Bell

The Hopi live in northern Arizona, surrounded by the reservations of the Navajo. They speak a Shoshonian dialect, and are often miscalled Moqui. The Department for forty years libeled them under this misnomer. Moqui is a Hopi term, and has been used against them by Navajo to signify anything inert, unpleasant, cowardly, dead. The dignified Navajo has another distinct title for the Hopi, and uses it when filled with courtesy. Moqui is probably a Keresan word originally, since it is found as “motsi” in Cochiti and San Felipe pueblos of the Rio Grande, whose warriors and rebels fled to the Hopi country for sanctuary after the rebellion of 1680.

Near the centre of that huge space on the Arizona map marked “Moqui Reserve” are the Hopi towns. These were known to the Spanish conquistadores as the Seven Cities of Tusayan. There are now nine pueblos.

In that early hour of geologic time when the receding waters carved the great gorges in the face of northern Arizona, the more resistant sandstones and clays and coals were left as shattered cliffs, and from these reach out many bony headlands—long fingers, at the crumbling tips of which, like villages clinging to a rocky coast, are the eyries of the Hopi. Below them, as sea-floors, are the sandy valleys and drifting dunes of the Painted Desert.

These nine little towns are set oddly in groups of three, and so are the Hopi divided, quite as into three distinct provinces. Three are balanced on the narrow backbone of the First Mesa, a knife-like projection that rises hundreds of feet above the valley, and is at one place not more than twenty feet in width. These are old Walpi, beloved of etchers, and Tewa of the warriors, and Sitchumnovi. Three are built on the broad mounds of the Second Mesa, known as Machongnovi, Chepaulovi, and Chimopovi. And perhaps the oldest and certainly the youngest of the villages are at Third Mesa—Oraibi, the aged; and tiny Bacabi; and redolent, sullen Hotevilla.

Their first contact with white men was made in the dark of an autumn night in 1540, but it was in the next dawn that they realized invasion by a new and strange enemy. Most of Hopi history has the dawn atmosphere. Their footprints lead back to the caves of the Dawn Men. Their homes face the rising sun from the highest point of the landscape; their ceremonies and hunts begin at sunrise. They are a dawn-loving people.

Contact with the Spaniards was broken by the revolt of 1680, and completely ceased with 1700; but the gifts of the enemy remained in fruits, and wool, and beasts of burden, and perhaps some loot of swords and Church vessels hidden to this day. The obstinate Hopi were not worth the effort at reconquest, and later the Mexican Government did not bother them. For more than one hundred and fifty years the Hopi knew only the Navajo and Apache and Ute as his enemies. With the close of the Mexican War and the treaty of 1848, this nearly forgotten tribe came under the nominal guardianship of the United States. I say nominal, for their first Agent was located in far-distant Santa Fe, and unlike the Spanish, he had no missioners to risk martyrdom for the spreading of his doctrine. In 1849 he accompanied an expedition against the Navajo, and reached Cañon de Chelly, about sixty miles from the First Mesa. One year later a delegation of Hopi visited this chief to petition for protection against the Navajo. I fancy them plodding afoot, behind their burros, timidly crossing the Navajo country to pass through the provinces of their kinsmen, the Pueblos, and on to the City of the Holy Faith. In that same year, 1850, their Agent was prevented from visiting them, as he wished, because he lacked an escort of troops.

Many estimates of the Hopi population were made in the early years. The Spaniard was an expert at overestimating for the benefit of distant kings. His thousands were always given as tens of thousands, and when he wanted money and help toward new colonies he stressed the saving of souls and could easily imagine millions of baptisms. But it is recorded in 1780 that smallpox had reduced the Hopi to less than 800. In 1899 their first resident Agent stopped guessing and made a count. He found and listed 1832 Hopi. In one hundred and nineteen years the population had little more than doubled. In 1912 there were 2068 on the Reserve, and in the next seven years they gained 217, or 31 per year—15 per thousand annually. They lost nearly sixty per cent of this seven-years’ gain in 1918, the year of Spanish influenza. In 1919 there were 2158 Hopi on the Reserve, and adding the absent, who had increased and multiplied in the west, at Moencopi, there were less than 2500 of these Indians alive. But this handful has interested more distinguished men and women than have many greater nations.

While there is much of Hebraic resemblance in the Navajo Indians,—their pastoral life and their religious customs,—a matter that strikes every thinking visitor and student, there is more of this in Hopi history. Their retreat southward from the cavern villages, from Betatakin Cave, from the Swallows’ Nest and Scaffold House—stopping to build a hamlet here and to reap a harvest there, leaving always testimony in potsherds and corn refuse—to their present cliffs, was much the same as the migrations of the Jews. Perhaps, having lost one citadel, they moved on to the next best position for defense; or perhaps a remnant of a once-powerful tribe fled; for we do not clearly know whether these cliff-dwellers migrated from choice, or to escape pestilence, or to avoid captivity. Across the relatively narrow territory of their hegira the Navajo and Apache—the once-combined “Apaches du Navaju”—and perhaps the Ute fought and harried, the Hopi quite as helpless as Judæa between Egypt and Babylonia. When they retired finally to such a place as old Walpi, to barricade the narrow causeway at the mesa-end and to defend the Walpi stairway, just wide enough for one enemy at a time, surely this was a desperate people making a last desperate stand. I have no doubt that the Hopi, peaceful as they have been and are named, fought some worthy fights before the white man was known on this continent. The determination that wore down the Spaniard must have had its martial quality when facing enemies armed no better than themselves. It required a brave war-party to attempt to storm those mesa strongholds. And their foes must have stood somewhat in awe too of Hopi incantations, made so impressive by their Snake legends and solemn mummery. The Snake gods protected them more than once, according to their priests, and are remembered in the ceremonies.

And the resemblance is not only in fanciful surmises. The daily life of the people duplicates in many ways the customs of the Judæans. A people of legends and portents. In the quiet nights they have watched those burning signals of the heavens that mark wars and the birth of kings. Perhaps their shepherds too have been summoned by such signs, inspiring them to missions and pilgrimages, bearing gifts, relating to that mythical Bohanna who will one day come to redeem and revivify the people. From the great chart of the heavens they take their calendar. And certainly, in the sunsets of that quiet and ever-tinted land their pueblos reflect the Old East, with its donkeys and goat-bells, and simple gardens by the springs, and the blurring dust of sheep in the half-tones of desert twilights.

Government reports of to-day give the unqualified fact (?) that the Hopi have a reservation of 3863 square miles, large enough, in all sense, for twenty-five hundred people! But the Hopi exist on and use less than one fifth of this semi-arid land, the remainder being held and dominated by their old plague, the Navajo. The Hopi Indian Agent has absolute jurisdiction—on paper—over all those Navajo living within the boundaries of the Hopi Reserve; but this does not mean that he is or ever has been able to control that undisciplined element of Navajo who pillage the peaceful Hopi whenever in the mood. Many bitter and scathing reports have been sent to Washington concerning this. Agents have not minced words, and have not always spared themselves in an effort to get justice—well, let us say, “consideration” for the Hopi. When reports failed to procure attention, one or two started crusades against the Navajo, not always successful, that ended in blows and bruises, to say nothing of the chance of sterner wounds. A difficult task to find the offender; if found, he was invariably supported by a gang—his gang. I recall one investigator who stated blandly that it was similar to conditions often found in cities: that of a corner gang. Quite so. But the investigator did not ask to see the corner, nor did he evidence any anxiety to encounter the gang.

The nomadic Navajo have a vast country to make themselves scarce in, quite 30,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it untracked; there is no quick communication between the six Agencies established to govern these people. It has been possible to coördinate business methods, so as to have uniform stock-regulations, for instance; but nothing has been arranged to guarantee the peace. There have been numerous murders in Navajo country. Representatives of the Board of Indian Commissioners, particularly Major-General Hugh L. Scott, and inspectors of the Indian Department have fired verbal volleys in support of Hopi Agents. Navajo have been dragged to the Agency guardhouse, and other Navajo have been haled before the Federal Courts when the Agent could arrange locally all the details of the haling. A one-time United States Marshal, charged with the duty of assisting, remained conspicuous by his absence from the scene. The matter finally attracted the attention of a sub-Committee of Congress, and brought about a field investigation of Hopi conditions, pictured in a printed report. I know that the report was complete, for I wrote it; in fact, I had prepared that report in 1918, and placed it before Congress two years prior to the appearance of the sub-Committee. The gentlemen graciously inserted it as a tailpiece to their otherwise innocuous comments.

But the wall of political indifference to anything that does not furnish a vote has not been dented. It is a mere matter between obscure tribes, a squabble in the hills, which occasionally embarrasses an Indian Agent and constantly annoys a helpless people who have no other court of appeal. Neither tribe nor Agent can threaten a politician. Both tribe and Agent are kept mute by an uncaring Bureau.

Announce, however, that these same Hopi Indians are wont to dance with live rattlesnakes! Ah! that is a different story, and received with different emotions. The politician rushes in to view the spectacle. The Bureau sheds crocodile tears about it. Reams of reports are called for and written. During the past twelve years the Hopi Snake Dance has troubled the Solons of the Interior Department far more than any signal of Hopi distress. The Christian ire of three administrations has been aroused by this primitive pagan ceremony. Result: the Hopi Snake Dance is as well advertised as the Grand Cañon of the Colorado!

Most picturesque of the Hopi towns is Walpi. You can procure a fine appreciation of this, the effect of standing on the roof of the last Walpi house and viewing the entire First Mesa therefrom, the narrow rugged top and the deep valleys on either side, the trail down to Polacca, the whole vast sweep of that distant and beautiful landscape—simply by visiting the New York Museum of Natural History. The artists have constructed a wonderful reproduction of that Enchanted Empire citadel. My friend of various wild spots in Indian country, Mr. Howard McCormick, magically brought the charm of the Hopi eyrie to the edge of Central Park.

I recall a particularly drab day in New York, one of those having a wintry edge that comes only off great waters, when I wandered into the Museum, seeking this exhibit. I had anticipated something of the usual order—papier-mâché, plaster, dust, and a ticket; but behold! I found myself at home, on the mesa-top, below me the First Mesa and the Wepo Valleys; and to my right would be Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the Winds, and in the dim distance Moits-o-ve, or Yucca Point. I felt that in a moment I should surely see Harry Shupula, the chief Snake priest, emerging from his kiva; and half aloud I addressed one of the group as “Quat-che” (friend). And at the foot of the winding trail, a little beyond the spring, would be the camp of the water-witch and a desert welcome—such a welcome as “Mac” and wandering Indian Agents receive. A great feeling of Heimweh came over me. I wished for a magic carpet, that I might step instantly from the lonely desert of New York into crowded, speaking Hopi-land.

I remember a conversation with a clergyman from Canada, as we stood at the inner edge of the crowd on the Walpi Snake Dance ledge, passing that bit of ominous wait just before the entrance of the Antelope priests for the annual ceremony. That is the time when the Hopi Indian Agent meets most celebrities and makes most of his enemies. Some words passed concerning the picturesqueness of old Walpi, and the magnificent view from our position. The plain below was bathed in a lemon light.

“Yes,” I said, casually, “the people would be better off in the valley, if we could get them to remove.”

“What!” he cried out in pain and direst astonishment. “Would you have them leave this beautiful place—this beautiful life!”

I had uttered sacrilege. No Hopi of the old school could have bettered the clergyman’s utter horror at the thought. But the gentleman, I am sure, gave little attention to many things an Agent sees that are not beautiful, things of distinct menace, hideous things. Walpi is a scenic place, a ruined castle in outline, and always steeped in color effects; but there is the dangerous ledge-road up which all supplies and wood and water must be packed, a road that has accounted for more than one Hopi when the brake would not hold. And did he not forget that women did much of the packing on their backs? And the old and blind, who had plunged over the sheer face of the cliff? And above all, the constant danger of the filth-infested houses, where trachoma and tuberculosis abide? These are things that a tourist does not notice, and when he is away from the color effects and the sound of drumming chants, they do not impinge on his vacant—his vacation mind.

Destroy Walpi as a picture? No. But as a human habitation, Yes!

I recall a visit to the Indian Office at Washington shortly after one of my characteristic reports on this very subject.

“What!” said a Bureau chief who, because he signed a great many letters daily without reading them, believed himself intelligent. “You recommended dynamiting the First Mesa—the destruction of that oasis of beauty, and peace, and—and—”

“And trachoma, and tuberculosis, and child prostitution,” I finished for him, as he gasped and his words failed, as I knew they would. Words always fail a Bureau chief. Like the long-range gun of the Germans, he is accustomed to firing things across the continent, secure in that the other fellow cannot immediately crash his words back into his teeth.

I had not recommended that. I had simply advocated the destruction of the road leading to Walpi, since the Government and its Bureau Chief would not advance sufficient moneys to make the road safe for travel.

That is the viewpoint of tourist and bureaucrat,—the artist has one of pure sentimentality,—of all those who have viewed the Hopi, who have been charmed by the color of his life, but who have been utterly blind to his miseries, and who have contributed nothing to his well-being.

No one has a keener appreciation than I of the artistic value of the Hopi pueblos—those old streets of worn rock where the bearded Spanish walked; the curious archways and the irregular little balconies from which children peer over at one; the thought of phantom Mission bells from the peach orchards. But I was not stupid enough to overlook that these same streets contained offal, that the houses were not ventilated, and that there were various unseemly stenches in the air. A tourist must leave his olfactory organs at home. And I knew, being in charge, that all the labor of industrious and conscientious field-matrons was not enough to keep those quaint streets and courtyards clean.

I remember another visitor at another Snake Dance, a man sitting on the parapet of a Hopi kiva, looking down through the ladder entrance. I saw that a number of dancers were below there, preparing costumes. They had an array of skins and masks and feathers, with many cans of bright paints.

“I suppose you know a good bit about that too?” I asked.

“Well, I recognize some of the signs, common to Indian people.”

“Shall we go down? You can give them a hand,” I suggested.

“I should like to, very much; but—won’t they object?”

“Perhaps I can arrange that,” and I started down the ladder. Several of the Indians glanced up, but, observing it was only Moungwi, said nothing.

“Here!” I called to them. “Here is a real friend of yours. You may not know him, but he understands many tribes, and their ways, and their signs. Put him to work. He can help with those costumes.”

One looked up from a robe he was painting, and thrust forward a brush and paints, as if to say: “Welcome, brother; fall to!”

The white visitor showed a rare facility. The Indians noticed it.

“You know him?” asked one, pointing to a design.

“Yes,” he said, naming it.

They laughed delightedly, and soon he was friend to them all. I left him in the kiva, busily working with them and chatting as much as possible with a limited vocabulary and many descriptive gestures. This was Ernest Thompson Seton. I have not seen him since, but afterward he forwarded a letter, thanking me for his entrée to the wardrobe-room of the First Mesa, and giving some excellent advice concerning the things we had discussed before he signed on as costume-painter for the Hopi tribe. Among all the visitors I met in Hopi-land, he was one of very few who sensed the things that should be done and those not done for their welfare. Briefly, his idea was that the community life should not be violently disrupted, for fear of the effect our own isolated rural populations had suffered; and that efforts should be made to keep alive all that is best in the social and mesa-plan of living, without permitting the Indian people narrowly to confine themselves to it. This of course would include the harmless dances or shows, the social features that many confuse with ceremonies. I could recall the earnest efforts made by former Agents to induce the people to leave the mesa heights—notably that one beginning in 1891, when houses were built for them in the flats, and later completely furnished. By 1900 at least one hundred such houses had been placed at Hopi disposal. And I knew that in 1911 not more than half of those houses were used even temporarily. The people would return for the society of their kind, drawn, too, by intense religious feeling for the ancient mesa home.

I could recall two abortive efforts made toward the allotment of these people in severalty: the scheme to have them accept parcels of land, many of which were miles from water, and on which it would have been impossible for families to subsist themselves, to say nothing of maintaining their sheep and other stock. The first of these allotment plans blew up in 1894; but the Bureau, wedded to the allotment theory, was not deterred. A second and most expensive effort died in 1911, after friends of the Indian plainly showed the farce of the proceedings, if they said nothing as to the inhuman side of it. This did not please the allotting agent, eager for his pay and job, nor his son, nor his assistants, nor the camp cook and the other hangers-on of an allotting crew. But thank God! it died, nevertheless.

The average bureaucrat, admiring the Allotment Acts, thinks that an Indian’s head may be jammed into a regulation lathe, and with a few twists and spins turned out a full-fledged Mid-west agriculturist—just such a man as Thompson Seton said needed community centres made for him, to keep him from becoming an inmate of an insane asylum. Just so. But it cannot be done, my masters, with the speed of the mimeograph that grinds out your tirades and exhortations. Your Allotment Acts have been good friends to South Dakotans and others who wished to speculate in lands; but they have produced untold misery among the Indian peoples, and have utterly destroyed an innocent and simple phase of American life.

Now I never agreed with the ecclesiastical gentleman who thought that the Hopi mesa system was wholly one of beauty and idealism. But the writing man did force on me a realization of the utility and sanity to be found in the life that the Hopi had unconsciously adopted. Begun as a defense against enemies, the result in peace times was for good, if accompanied by sanitation and the protection of the younger generation. And I accepted a new view of the Indian ceremony and dance.

Until we furnish something as good in place of the Indian social dance, why rave about it? We might easily have a large number of low-spirited, sullen, and even dangerous Indians on our hands if it were not for these joyous occasions. So long as the dances are clean, can any one quarrel with a Ya-be-chai of the Navajo, a Corn Dance of the Hopi, or one of the Pueblo spectacles, half pagan, half Catholic? I have seen scores of such dances, not as a tourist, but as the man on the ground in charge, and I have not been able to figure out that they are one bit worse than a country picnic among our own bucolic population of Texas or South Dakota, for instance. I have seen a South Dakota Rotary Club cut as many fool antics as a Southwest Indian clan.

I recall an illustration from my very short stay among the Sioux in 1922. It was the Fourth of July, and I had permitted the old Indians to hold their dance on the hills. It had long been the custom to stop their merrymaking at sunset, and a very good ruling too. But this Fourth was unusually quiet, the booze-runners not having appeared as per schedule. The Indians petitioned me to permit just a little dancing after nightfall. It had been very quiet, and my special police force was large enough, and seemed loyal enough, to assure good order.

“All right,” I said. “But please remember that I shall have a squad of police there, and I shall be there myself; so don’t start any shines.”

They had a very creditable evening party, and the peace was not broken. Later I visited the Agency amusement hall where a number of whites, visitors from the countryside and more than one mixed-blood couple of education, were enjoying themselves to the latest jazz. Now I am no authority on dancing and, having lived among Indians, I am not easily shocked; but the postures and attitudes of those South Dakota whites were—well, a trifle extreme, to say the least of it.

“We have looked at them both,” said an old Sioux to me, anxiously. “Au-tay-ah-pe (Father), there may be something wrong with the Indian’s drum dance, but—I do not like the white man’s fiddle dance.”

I told him very frankly which I thought the worse. There is no use in trying to bluff an old Indian. He can see through a hypocrite quicker than any man I know.

This is not a sentimentalist defence of the old Indian dance. I have bitterly excoriated the “secret” dances of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, but could never get sufficient backing from the Department to end them. Such indecencies may be found among all primitive peoples, and those of the Pueblos who indulge in them are most primitive—the barbarians of San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and other decadent backward pueblos. But I have tried to envision the social side of an alien people who have no other form of diversion than the spectacle of the dance. Were the Government to put them on a moving-picture circuit—but we were discussing the decencies.

And, to repeat: When we have established among them an amusement as appealing, simple, and inoffensive, it will be time for the condemnation of those features that are innocuous and foreign. And it will be long before I shall forget the comparison, by an Indian, between the dance of the Sioux with drums and sleighbells, a noisy soul-stirring hullabaloo, and—the seductive, suggestive “white man’s fiddle dance.”

XVII

SERVICE TRADITION

When first, as an employee of the Government, I answered the
grave salutation of the red man, the buffalo roamed at will
over the great plains of the Sioux country; the iron horse
had not crossed the Minnesota boundary; the dull, plodding
ox was the courier and herald of the culture that was stowed
in embryo in the prairie schooner; Chicago was just beginning
to throw off its swaddling-clothes under a blanket of smoke;
St. Paul was the frontier to the Northwest ... and that was
only a generation ago.—McLaughlin: My Friend, the Indian

The work of this reservation was that of a frontier. Until the late nineties, army officers, acting as agents, had administered affairs from Fort Defiance, distant about eighty-five miles from the First Mesa of the Hopi. The country between these points is rough, and in winter often impassable. The commanding officer did not make the two days’ journey frequently, and when he did, entertainment at trading-posts would occupy most of his time. There were no other local stations. Until 1887 no official of this Government resided permanently within the Hopi territory; so that, from Spanish times until that date, these Indians had received little attention.

In 1886 a petition, signed by twenty Hopi head-men, requested Washington to give them a school, that their children might “grow up good of heart and pure of breath.” But one of these men, Honani of Chimopovi, always a friendly chief, is now alive. Shupula, who signed as Second Chief of the Moki, died, a benign old man, in 1917.

So in 1887 a school was started in Keams Cañon, at the site of one of Carson’s old camps, a picturesque alcove of the walls having a group of springs, and where Tom Keams, a trading Englishman, had long kept a post. Twelve years later a resident Agent, having authority to act as one in complete charge, was appointed.

Between the years 1890 and 1916, sub-Agents and the later Agents accomplished much permanent work for the people. The first school was succeeded by a modern training school in the lower Cañon. An Agency radiated orders and the tools of civilization. In the field at the pueblos were six day-schools to care for the younger children. Five hundred pupils attended regularly. The Indian youngsters advanced from the kindergarten and primary day-schools to the training school, where they received some knowledge of trades, and from thence to the larger non-reservation schools, patterned after Carlisle, such as are at Albuquerque, New Mexico; Phœnix, Arizona; Riverside, California.

But not only in point of education had there been progress. Tracks of the reserve had become roads, as the Indians were supplied wagons and implements; and ascending the rocky mesas, linking the different villages, were highways that had been cut from the solid rock, and that, considering the means and cost, were fair pieces of engineering. The Agents had built and enlarged the schools, and had opened mines to supply the winter fuel. The live stock of both tribes—for the Navajo came to this Agency—showed improvement. A most important advance had been made in medication. Three physicians attended the several districts. Trachoma had been greatly reduced. There was no longer the dread of uncontrolled epidemics, such as that one of smallpox that nearly wiped out the Hopi in 1780. And after 1913 a well-appointed hospital received the serious cases, especially those requiring surgical treatment. Between 1911 and 1919 vaccines were freely used to combat smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, pneumonia, and influenza. The Pasteur treatment was given. Surgery, minor and major, was a matter of routine, and with low mortality.

Whereas in 1900 the first Agent had but twenty-one employees, in 1915 there were above one hundred serving the various activities of the Empire. A force of water-development men, locally known as “witches,” had greatly augmented the water-supply to the pueblos and their stock, through enlarging mesa-springs and the drilling of shallow wells in the washes. The supreme water-witch of the Empire, Mr. A. H. Womack, in later years discovered artesian flows. And by far the most of this work was accomplished after 1910.

But of troubles there had been no end. It not only was necessary to conquer frontier handicaps,—the distance from supplies, the bitter winters that blighted transportation, and the frequent changes of a restless and dissatisfied employee-force,—but was also necessary to fight the superstition and not always negative resistance of a fanatical and unreasoning people. Five times between 1899 and 1911 troops were sent to this reserve to quell disturbances or to enforce Governmental regulations.

One of the great reasons for Indian unrest had been that few Agents remained in charge long enough to influence the people. It requires at least four years of patient work to know the Hopi, to gain his confidence, if indeed one ever gets it. And in the thirty-two years after 1887 there were eleven different officers in charge. Prior to 1911, the longest period of service had been a little more than four years. Men quit or were transferred before they had made a beginning. Twenty years of the time were divided among nine officials, little more than two years for each, scarcely long enough to learn the country and its divisions. I recall some lonely years in the Desert, when the Cañon walls seemed a prison, but I am now glad to write that I directed its Hopi-Navajo population for more than eight years, twice the time of any other Governmental officer.

Of those who had the early work, there were two who exerted a strong personal influence: Mr. Ralph Collins, who was twice appointed a sub-Agent, and Mr. Charles E. Burton, who was the first Indian Agent. Collins had not complete authority, and his efforts were not always supported, but much of suspicion among the Hopi could have been avoided if he had been listened to. Burton, having carried out certain fool orders, was hounded by sentimentalists during most of his service. But both these men accomplished things for the Hopi people, and are kindly remembered among the elders. Their improvements have not entirely disappeared, and wherever one finds an English-speaking Hopi of middle age, the credit may be given to one of these men.

But in 1911 two things had not been finished, and one important thing was only vaguely planned. There was no fixed policy for the development of the reserve, and no one had succeeded in breaking the power of Youkeoma, that hostile witch-doctor who had made trouble since 1887. One could not hope to succeed without the first, and the success of the first depended largely on the second. The health work had been sporadic, and was ineffective without a hospital. My predecessor had procured an allotment of eight thousand dollars with which to construct one, whereas thirty thousand—considering Service methods—would not have been too large a sum.

I felt that a consistent policy of control was vitally necessary; that the country and the people in it, both whites and Indians, must be brought under strict regulation; that Youkeoma’s influence must be broken; and I proposed to use the eight thousand dollars, plus whatever additional sum I could talk out of Washington, plus the resources of the reserve in cheap labor, stone, sand, and equipment, mixed with something approximating brains, to have a hospital that would be a benefit to the Indians and a credit to the Service, which too often has constructed buildings that were neither.

Regulation and control required only horse-sense and a little vision. Resolution and earnestness, accompanied by justice and fair-dealing, make a combination that few Indians can resist. The man who fails in the Southwest Indian country is the one who ignores his people’s conception of fair play, and who forgets to keep his word. There have been white men among the Hopi-Navajo who, unmindful of their own two thousand years of background, proposed to correct everything in an afternoon. Discovered in 1540, brought under supervision in the recent eighties, it was and is too big a job for an afternoon.

And why not view with sympathetic consideration the problems of the Indian who, having little education and no vote, being practically as inarticulate as a deaf-mute, childish and incompetent, must trust someone, and is inclined to trust the only official he knows?

Why not be a decent Indian Agent, out of respect for one’s self?

There are relatively few people who know that the United States Indian Service has a history, a tradition as it were, to be honored and lived up to. Few men in the service have the lively curiosity and interest in their charges that is necessary for success among primitive peoples, few who rise above personal prejudice, who can resist feeble enmity. There have been the early-day McLaughlins, Sheltons, and Carrolls, each of whom built himself a Service name by one efficient means or another; but those men have been in the minority.

Now the Army officer has a tradition, and the Naval officer has one. Why ought not other Government officials to view their commissions on as high a plane? Should a reader interpose to mention “scandals”—why, to be sure; there have been many; but they have not destroyed the Indian, and they have not ruined the Service. All Departments of the Government have had scandals of greater or less degree. There was a certain Arnold, an army officer of very high rank; but we need not go back so far. There was enough doing in the year of grace, nineteen hundred and twenty-four, and enough is sometimes too much. There have been timber scandals, and land scandals, and oil scandals, as the wealth of the Indian country has been exploited. And there is the scandal—or should be—of manipulation of individual Indian moneys. And the scandal of keeping inefficients in office. And some Indian Agents have gone to jail, and some should be there, accompanied by those who have protected them. All true, and granted. Nevertheless, the body of them have an honorable tradition as old as the United States itself.

In 1786, in the Articles of Confederation, consideration was given to Indian affairs. Two superintendents were provided for, who had the “comprehension” of all nations of Indians south of the Ohio River and all west of the Hudson. Their exact “comprehension” was no doubt much smaller than their outlined territories.

The Federal Constitution of 1788 deemed it important that the Central Government should have exclusive power over intercourse with Indian tribes. The Supreme Court of the United States later amplified this to include everything that may arise out of our relations with the Indians.

Congress in 1789 appropriated the first moneys to defray expenses of negotiating and treating with the Indians. While the Commissioners were referred to as “agents,” their authorities did not extend beyond treating with the native.

George Washington, in a letter dated August 29, 1789, instructed Messrs. Benjamin Lincoln, Cyrus Griffin, and David Humphrey as “commissioners plenipotentiary for negotiating and concluding treaties of peace with the independent tribes or nations of Indians within the limits of the United States south of the Ohio River.” This commission made a report to the Secretary of War, and from its suggestions grew the licensed-trader system, although the first traders acted as factors, and to some extent as agents, for the tribes with which they were affiliated.

Congress in 1790 provided a method for trading with the Indian tribes under license, but no Indian Agents would appear to have been authorized, as such, by law prior to 1796, when were established the trading-houses on the western and southern frontiers, or in the Indian country, and the appointment of men to manage them under the direction of the President.

The factors were the first real Agents for routine Indian business. This was the first experiment. The law limited it to two years, but its life was extended from time to time until 1822, when the system of Government trading-houses was abolished.

Acts of 1800, 1802, and 1806 provided for other experiments; and after 1806 there were actually four types of Indian officials:

1. Governors of the various Territories, who were ex-officio
superintendents of Indian Affairs within their jurisdictions.

2. Certain Agents who were primarily under the direction
of these Governors.

3. A Superintendent of Indian Trade.

4. The Factors under his direction.

When in 1819 and 1820 Congress provided for the employment of persons to educate the Indians, the appointment of Agents to specific tribes began.

When the trading-house system expired in 1822, the factors disappeared. Indian trade is conducted to-day by licensed traders, who are under bond, and expected to live within Indian country.

In 1824 the Secretary of War, without authority, organized a Bureau of Indian Affairs, probably to ease his main office of details; and eight years later the President was authorized by Congress to appoint a Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

The Act of 1834 conferred upon the officers of Indian country the authorities they invoke to-day with respect to control of the native and those who may seek to oppress him. This Act did not apply to the Territories of Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico. The Agents for the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were handicapped in their work until 1913, when the Supreme Court of the United States clarified that situation by the Sandoval decision.

In the early days, army officers were designated to perform the duties of Indian Agents, and the Indians were brought under strict military rule; and this, taken in connection with the imperative language of the laws enacted, tended further to increase the powers of the Agent.

By an Act of 1847, directing distribution of annuities and treaty goods, most Indians were brought to a condition of complete dependence on the central Government. If prior thereto they had enjoyed any civil liberty, the fragment was taken from them. Many looked to the guardian even for food, and when the guardian was aware of him—most Southwest groups were outside this soup-kitchen zone—it was provided. And then came opportunity to those who made a scandal of the “ration” days, and presented Robert Louis Stevenson and other brilliant sentimentalists with a slur from which the honest Indian Agent has suffered. Wherever the Government had cognizance of an Indian, he was a child without rights other than those his Agent permitted him to enjoy. As late as 1922, acting as a Sioux Agent, and being overwhelmed a thousand times daily by the emasculated title of Major, I signed many permits allowing old warriors to leave the so-called Reservation—it was really a sanctuary for whites—for trading- and visiting-trips, a long-obsolete bit of red tape that the vanquished one still recognized. I could not very well have prevented his going without a permit, but as he saw fit to believe in the old system, I signed the papers cheerfully. At least those older majors of the army had instilled into the elder Sioux a respect and obedience, without destroying their pride or confidence.

In 1849 the Department of the Interior was organized, and it was authorized to have supervisory and appellate powers in Indian Affairs theretofore exercised by the Secretary of War. The Secretary of the Interior became head of the Indian Department, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs acting under him.

The local control of reservations remained quite the same. Native police were authorized in 1878, but the Agent continued to be sole judge of the guilt or innocence of Indians charged with offenses. In 1883 the Courts of Indian Offenses were devised, an idealistic experiment, no doubt originating in the far East. It was hoped to encourage the Indian somehow to discipline himself. But it has proved farcical, and when used at all is a mere instrument in the hands of the Agent. During the past fourteen years I have had charge of four Indian reserves: the “Moqui,”—now correctly named Hopi,—where are many Navajo; the Pueblo; the Crow Creek Sioux; and the Colorado River Mohave; these extended into five states, comprising a total population of 14,000 Indians of six different tribes and many local divisions; and among all these natives I have found but one Indian having the requisite intelligence and unprejudiced standpoint to warrant his presiding as a Judge of the Indian Court. It would be unfair not to name this man. He is Pablo Abeita, of the Isleta tribe of Tihua—Pueblo—Indians in New Mexico. And after years of loyalty to his honored Agents (not all of them were honored) he has reaped as his reward tribal enemies, and political and civil ones. The one man who proved the value of the experiment was made the goat. Such are the fruits of idealism, preserved by new leaders who come staggering under many inventions for the benefit of Poor Lo.

These historical facts have been briefed from an article entitled “The Evolution of the Indian Agent,” written by the late Kenneth F. Murchison, one-time Chief Law Clerk for the Office of Indian Affairs, and printed in the Commissioner’s Annual Report for 1892. The writer closed with this significant statement:

The Indian Agent now has almost absolute power in the Indian
country, and so far as the people over whom he rules are concerned,
he has none to contest his power. Appointed at first in the
capacity of a commercial agent or consul of the United States in
the country of an alien people, the Indian Agent, under laws
enacted and regulations promulgated, has developed into an officer
with power to direct the affairs of the Indians and to transact
their business in all details and in all relations.