Chapter IX: Section 3839: “All marriages valid by the laws of the place where (1)

contracted, shall be valid in this state; PROVIDED, that all
marriages solemnized in any other state or country by parties
intending at the time to reside in this state shall have the same
legal consequences and effect as if solemnized in this state;
parties residing in this state cannot evade any of the provisions
of its laws as to marriage by going into another state or country
for the solemnization of the marriage ceremony.”

Arizona and its people have no desire for a population of half-breeds; and it is a pity that not all the sovereign States of the Union have been filled with an equal pride. There is one State where it has been found to be necessary to proscribe by law the usage of the term “squaw man.”

While the Agents of to-day have not the military with which to coerce obedience, they have, as Stevenson once wrote of dogs, a strong sense of their rightness and superior position in action. The moral authority is theirs, and the legal means has not been emasculated.

The Regulations for the Indian Service, dated 1904, and unamended in so far as control of closed reservations is concerned, were based very largely on the Act of 1834. Since these regulations were issued, the Indian Agents have been engulfed by 2000 additional rules, advices, warnings, sermons, and remonstrances; but no modification of law-and-order guides has been encountered; and these original regulations have been consistently sustained by the United States District Courts.

An Indian of the Enchanted Empire may be dealt with by his Agent as surely as were the Sioux of the ’80’s. I had occasion to revive the permit system for both whites and Indians, to supervise the conduct of whites within Indian country, to protect native ceremonies, ruins, and graves, to deport those visitors and Bolsheviks considered of no immediate benefit to the quiet Indian population, to arrest and arraign both Indians and whites for offenses, to sentence them, and to see that the sentence was respected.

Now mark you! This does not mean that every Indian Agent is a functioning Agent. It may as well be said, frankly, so long as this is getting out of the family circle, that few Indian Agents perform their fully authorized duty when it is possible to intimidate them: a process often recognized by quavering superiors at Washington who hope to outlast a dying Administration.

But before coming to the field in 1910, I saw three Secretaries of the Interior steadfastly uphold these Regulations; and as an Indian Agent in the field I have been strongly supported by three other Secretaries of the Interior, to the end that my Indian charges, until 1922, were the best-protected people on earth.

XVIII

BUTTONS AND BONDS

And he sat down over against the treasury, and beheld how the
multitude cast money into the treasury; and many that were rich
cast in much. And there came a poor widow, and she cast in two
mites, which make a farthing.—Mark, xii. 41, 42

I have heard it said by old-timers, and they could very nearly prove their suspicions through comparison of customs and the dragging in of the Bible, that the Navajo are the Jews of the Desert, a lost tribe of Israel. And suffice it to say that the true son of David has never been able to prosper in their country. The closest approach of these wanderers to the Navajo has been an invasion by marriage of a certain part of the Pueblo Indian country in New Mexico. Those who once made the effort to penetrate the Hopi-Navajo area of the Enchanted Empire have withdrawn, defeated and outwitted.

But if this is the advantage that the Navajo as a trader has over his white brother, in what relation does the Hopi stand to the Navajo? I cast about me for a simile, and find none.

The desert post-trader welcomes the Navajo when he comes on a purchasing expedition, because the Navajo is a spender and makes for quick sales and large profits. It is when the Navajo is trading wool and blankets and silver junk for hard dollars that the post-trader peels his eye to the nerve, and then hopes he will not get skinned. But the Hopi is maddening as a buyer. It will take a Hopi longer to spend two bits than for a Navajo to squander a month’s freight-earnings. An astute trader once described the Hopi method to me.

“You know,” he said, as if in pain, “an Oraibi will come into my place, hungry. You can tell he is hungry by the look of him. Hasn’t had his breakfast. And he will have come to buy something to eat. And then he will stand before the canned-goods shelves, if I am not watching, and get a full meal by just looking at the labels. Yes sir! Seen it many a time—look at a can of pears and lick his lips until satisfied, then go out without changing a dime. Give me a Navajo every time.”

This same trader at Oraibi—Charlie was murdered by the Navajo, for all his love of them as customers,—would praise the Hopi as bankers. He was located ninety miles from his headquarters and several hundred of miles from his bank. A trader must pay in cash or negotiable checks to Indians, according to the regulations, and on that reservation they had to do it. There was no “tin money,” no trade tokens were used. Charlie would run short of cash.

“I can go to the door, and whistle,” he declared, “and get a thousand dollars silver from the mesa.”

The Hopi liked him, and trusted him, and once tried to protect him.

The bank the Hopi patronizes is his sand bank, or its equivalent—a hole in the wall of his stone house, cleverly concealed, a place under the hearth, or a sack in his corn-cellar.

It is seldom that the Hopi make presents. Curios have a potential value with the trading public, and the Hopi believes that the laborer is worthy of his hire. When they think well of one, likely they will wait until he is leaving the country and then bear what is comparatively a priceless gift, something different in basketry or pottery from those hackneyed forms duplicated so often for the touring invaders. Where the Sioux will impoverish himself in feasting and gifting his friends, the Hopi regards brotherhood on a different basis. But I have in mind to show when the flood of his generosity was loosened.

The Great War opened, and later “Washington” was involved. War is a lost art in the Desert, but old warriors like to think of battles. The far-removed Indians were interested in more ways than one. The registration of them, a silly proceeding, caused not a little panic among the unknowing. While Agents who knew law advised that the non-competent and non-English-speaking ward would not and could not be drafted, this made no difference to those who drew up the schedule. It caused more than annoyance; it caused some little apprehension in the Desert. Said Navajo chiefs to me:—

“You want soldiers for this war of Washington’s? Very well, we will select them, and then married men will not be taken from their families, nor young men from helpless parents. How many do you want?”

Was not their thought a trifle wise?

But it was not to be done that way. Little blue cards had been printed, and the Indian Agent was nominated registrar for all persons of his jurisdiction, whites and Indians, including himself. The Navajo simply evaded; but the Hopi lists were prepared, and so much time and paper and little blue cards were wasted.

Some of the Hopi took an equally fantastic view of the crisis. At Oraibi were located the Mennonite missionaries, an earnest people, but many of them of German extraction. A Hopi delegation waited on them, saying: “In a few days there will be war. Washington will be at war with Germany. You are Germans. You will be our enemies then, for we are supporting Washington. What will you do when Washington sends the order to kill you?”

This was no doubt a very discouraging vision to have before one.

The Hopi interest in war-time methods and inventions could always be aroused through the illustrations in the great dailies. My pictorial sections of the New York Times were in great demand. They would pore over them, remarking the vast number of soldiers, and would ask for many explanations. Men were flying as birds through the air, and carrying the war beneath the waters. They had seen locomotives and automobiles; and they could believe in the aeroplane and the submarine, because of white man’s magic. But at wireless they balked.

“No!” said one old Indian, emphatically. “That is too much. The telephone—yes, I understand, for there is a wire, and the man’s words go through that wire, inside—I see that. But now you tell me of a man talking from here to the mesa, twenty miles, without a wire? No—excuse me, but that is too much.”

Then came the food regulations; and food in the Desert is a limited fare at best. The Indian menu is slim enough, and much of it in flour. He had no use for substitutes that the trader was compelled to have him purchase, and when his horses disdained cornmeal as fodder, the Navajo began to be aggrieved. He had offered to help Washington with his prowess, no mean gift, and he could not see how an empty stomach helped campaigns.

But came the first call for Indian help that could be accepted. A bazaar was advertised, to be held in Washington, the proceeds to finance a hospital unit. The Indians were invited to contribute curios. Knowing Hopi thriftiness, I did not feel that they would respond in great measure. I sent out the call and waited. When lo! for a time the sale of pottery to trading-posts ceased. My warehouse began to overflow with the donations. Hopi pottery is fragile; does not ship well; and I felt that so generous a response should have good packing for the journey of twenty-six hundred miles to Washington. I know how much they gave in clay products, for I personally packed the major part of it. There was not time to ship by freight, express gave no insurance against breakage, so it was forwarded by parcel post. There was a trifle of silverware; a rug or two of Hopi weave; there were reed plaques, and small baskets, and pottery,—bowls and trays and plates and odd forms,—hundreds of pieces. A tenderly whimsical thought: the vision of some wounded lad finding relief through an old Hopi woman’s moulding and baking clay figures, far from the hysteria of the cities, far from the guns and stench of war, but contributing the one thing she knew, while humming some chant, perhaps of ancient battles.

Next came the bond sales.

Now there was a deal of press-shouting anent the millions invested by Indians in Liberty Bonds; and the Indians did invest millions in these securities. But an explanation throws an illuminating light on the Bureau’s puffery. Indian Agents, having Indian moneys in their control, bought most of those bonds. There is nothing much to shout over, or for that matter to weep over,—as a certain Commissioner was wont to do when his emotions slipped,—if an Agent calls in old Jimmie Crowfeet, and says to him: “Jimmie, you have twenty thousand dollars to your account, from the sale of your dead children’s lands, the leasing of your own and your wife’s allotments, and the careful manner in which I have marketed your cattle. Now you will need but two thousand dollars to cover the next several years. I propose that you place the remainder of your money in Government bonds at four per cent. Savvy? You help Washington. Washington help you sometime mebbeso.”

If Jimmie did not understand all at once, it was done for him anyway. In any case, it was done. The Bureau directed it. And that’s that. A trifle different from the story pushed into the Sunday supplement.

But with the Hopi—the Hopi had no moneys in the hands of his Agent. The Hopi has not had lands for sale—thank God who made the Desert! and the Hopi has not had lands to lease, thank God who was stingy with the water. He sells his cattle for himself, and places the results down in that pocket which is his own.

It would have to be a selling campaign; and I had first to convince the Hopi, rude, unlettered, and suspicious always of documents, especially those of Government, that this green paper would prove the same as fifty or one hundred dollars in hard silver.

He knew of the country’s need and danger. It was easy to explain that soldiers, armies, must have guns, ammunition, clothes, blankets, medicines, and grub. The Hopi has to have all of these himself, even on a peace footing. For him to propose to give curios, manufactures, even corn, his staff of life, was simple; but the Agent was asking for money, in lots of fifty, hundreds, and other multiples, the security being a piece of green paper that the Hopi could not read, that would be hard to safeguard from fire or theft, and that might prove only as good as some other promises of our slow-moving Uncle in the East, who had often forgotten him and at least once betrayed him.

“What shall we do if hard times come, and we must have cash?”

I knew that a Hopi would never be able to grasp market conditions. Indeed, being of “the sticks,” I had little idea myself that Government bonds would so quickly slump in value. It was necessary to convince and sell; and I held the confidence of these people to some degree.

“I will see to it that every man’s bond is redeemed at face value, should he come to me in need. You will not have to wait for maturity. These bonds will not go begging.”

And in some cases, I had it to do, regardless of the quotation. But these instances were few, and to the credit of the Hopi be it said that, once invested, the major part stood firm, treasuring their green papers, the first bank-accounts that many of them had ever owned.

It was at the Second Mesa that I held my first meeting, and a whole group of hold-tights and skeptical were swept into buying through the example of the poorest and most despised man of that district. They gathered at the council and asked many questions.

“But we are poor, and we have no money for bonds,” they protested.

“I am not asking you for fifty dollars to-day, or to-morrow. I am asking you for one dollar, and the promise to pay out the balance in installments. When you have paid the full fifty dollars, with interest, I will deliver the bond to you.”

“How can Washington sell a fifty-dollar paper for one dollar?”

“Washington will not. But I will go to the banks at the railroad, and borrow forty-nine dollars at interest for each man who agrees to buy a bond. The bank will hold the bond as security until all your payments are made, and then deliver it.”

They were dubious of that. Said one young fellow: “How can you borrow so much money? If twenty of us sign for bonds, and pay you one dollar each, you will have to borrow twenty times forty-nine dollars. Will the banks lend you that much?”

“With the bonds held as security, yes. Try it out.”

On that basis I hoped to carry my district’s quota; and as a matter of recorded fact I sold to one hundred and thirty Hopi Indians $11,600 in bonds, and for the whole reservation, including a few Navajo and many whites, $36,200 during the five bond-selling campaigns. I three times held the honor-flag for that county, competing with white men’s towns, and my last honor-flag had three stars sewn to it, showing that the Hopi Reserve had sold three times its quota. It snapped in the breeze very proudly at the Agency, under Old Glory.

But these first prospects of the Second Mesa were holding back. If I failed here, there would be no use in going to other mesas. Indians are like sheep. The individual takes his politics from the mob. There was some suspense.

And then arose an old Hopi. His coat was ragged, and his hat battered. He had been a captive in Mexico, and spoke Spanish better than his native tongue. Perhaps he had drifted away in the early days, perhaps he had been taken prisoner in a Border foray, perhaps he had been one of those parted with at Corn Rock, quien sabe? He was a butt in the village because of his grand manner acquired among the Spanish people, and twice he had appealed to me for justice when the home folks were treating him unfairly.

“Superintendente!” he spoke out, “I will buy a bond.”

There was a shout of laughter from the Indians. They knew that this poor fellow had no fifty dollars, that he did not possess a cash dollar. It was a joke; and Indian ridicule is cruel.

“All right, Wupa—come forward.”

“Señor Superintendente! You will sell me a bond?”

“Yes, I will sell you a bond, as quickly as any one else.”

“Upon the payment of a dollar?” he deliberated, gravely.

“That is right. You pay a dollar down, and I will give you a receipt for it; then I will borrow the rest for you, holding the bond as security until you have paid it out.”

He looked around at his tormentors, as if to say: “You see, this man knows a Spanish gentleman when he meets one.” All his Indian pride, plus all he had garnered from the Dons, was aroused. He came to the desk, while they continued to cry him down.

“Where’s your dollar?” they asked mockingly. “You haven’t any dollar!”

And I was much afraid he had not. A fluke would not do. It would mean losing the lot, and I knew there were many present who could afford to buy on payments and who would make good.

The old man grinned wisely.

“I will sign the paper for a bond,” he said.

The blank was shoved forward to him. He daubed his right thumb on an ink-pad to make his thumb-print, the signature the Government accepts from Indians who cannot write. He pressed it down on the dotted line.

“Now where’s your dollar, old father?” jeered the crowd.

Slowly he reached into his pocket, and drew out a rusty jackknife. He looked all around him gravely, knowing, as a Spanish-Indian knows, that he and he only held the centre of the stage. And then, beginning at the top, he began to cut buttons from his old coat—Navajo silver buttons, coin of the Empire when in need. He placed them, one by one, on the desk before me, counting: “Una—dos—tres—”

They were worth fifteen, perhaps twenty cents each, as the desert market fluctuated. As he laid each button down, he looked at me to see if the dollar was completed.

“That isn’t money,” said one of the crowd.

“Cinco—” he counted, looking up.

“Buena! Lo-lo-mi! Write a receipt for one dollar, and mark Wupa down as having bought a bond.”

“Thank you, Quat-che [friend]; you are the first man to help Washington.”

We shook hands on it, and he was proud of himself. Turning, “You see—” he motioned to the crowd, and strutted back to his place. The others were now silent. In a manner of speaking, their bluff had been called; and by Wupa!

“Now who buys the second bond to help Washington?”

Those who had laughed and mocked the loudest were now quiet. They began to sway about, hesitating, looking from one to another, and then to come forward. In the next few minutes, twelve hundred dollars in Liberty Bonds were sold, most of them for spot cash. The old man from the border had “helped me out,” as the Indians say, and when the selling was over I read them a mild lecture on making game of their first patriot. To my astonishment, several of them then offered to help him with a fence he was building all alone.

As I drove away, around by the Corn Rock, I heard a shouting behind me. I pulled up, wondering what I had forgotten. It was the old man, coming down from his house on the height, bearing a bucket of peaches, the delicious Hopi peaches that are as a blessing of the Spanish padres. He put them into the auto and made a bow in the Latin style, hat sweeping, hand upon his breast.

I shall never forget old Wupa of the Second Mesa, a wanderer in strange lands, an alien at home, who bought the first Liberty Bond with buttons from his ragged coat.

At the First Mesa I expected more of attention, because they are the progressives of the Hopi, albeit they have progressed through being pushed. The First Mesa and its several settlements are but thirteen miles from the Agency headquarters, on the direct road to anywhere in the field, and so their people have received more of regular attention. The missionaries have made most progress there, and the Indians are fortunate in having had two field matrons assigned to that station. The first, Miss Sarah E. Abbott, who later faced down the Hotevilla, had proceeded to educate and influence them; and the second, Miss Mary Y. Rodger, has for the past fourteen years not only influenced and assisted them, but in large measure helped to direct them. They have also had the benefit of the Desert’s chief water-witch, Mr. A. H. Womack, who has his office at their mesa, and who has greatly influenced and improved all the Indians of the Desert.

But in matters of purchase the thrifty Hopi, of whatever location, is inclined to pursue the label-tasting method. I found myself up against the same detailed explanations, although knowing that hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars should be garnered there. Once again a patriotic Hopi came to my rescue. This was Tom Pavatea, the full-blood Hopi merchant. Tom is one of those few Indians who have succeeded without the handicap of an education. Being a sensible man, he of course deplores the fact that he decamped as a child from the first school, and that a busy principal forgot him. Tom conducts an excellent store, carrying goods of standard quality, and his prices are not calculated on the altitude scale. Perhaps three-quarters of the Hopi trade in pottery is dispatched through his hands. He is fairly rich in livestock on the range, and has saved his money. Finance, however, troubles him at times, and I hope the last Western bank-crash has not caused him to suspect white men’s accounting. Years ago he could not fathom the mystery of interest.

“Please explain,” said Tom, quite perplexed, “Why should that bank pay me something for keeping my money? They have a strong steel box, and I get the service, and I should pay them for keeping my money safe.”

Therefore I hope that he will never be deceived; because, on its being explained to him, he did not seem altogether easy in his mind. He had been rather of the opinion that his actual money always reposed in the vaults he had seen in the cities.

As to Liberty Bonds for the winning of the war, Tom had been solicited by an employee prior to my arrival.

“I’ll match you buying bonds, when the boss comes.”

“Match me?” inquired Tom, not grasping the idea.

“Yes—every dollar you spend, I’ll match you.”

“Dollar for dollar,” said Tom, “one dollar, me; one dollar, you?”

“That’s the game.”

“Well,” said Tommie, who always played as safely as he could, “I don’t know these games; but you get your check-book ready.”

He patiently waited through my talk to the curious but not over eager crowd, and then he came forward.

“This man, Leaming,” he announced, indicating the employee,—a gentleman who has nominated himself in a number of campaigns for the mayoralty of Polacca, and invariably lost to the water-witch,—“this man wants to match me in buying bonds. I don’t know about that. I haven’t any cash to spare to-day,—but will you take him?” The “him” was a piece of paper. “If you take him, all right with me.”

“Is Mr. Leaming to cover this purchase?” I asked.

“He tell me so. I buy—he matches me.”

“That’s my proposal,” said Mr. Leaming, repressing a strong desire to view the figures on the slip.

“But, Tommie, this certificate of deposit will not mature for thirty days. Withdrawal at this time may cost you six months’ interest, although I think I can arrange it that you will lose no interest. And another point—I am anxious to sell bonds, but this certificate bears interest at four and one-half per cent, and your bond will pay only four per cent. You may lose six months’ interest, and you will surely lose one-half of one per cent interest each year.”

“I know all that, lo-lo-mi,” he answered; “Washington has a war, and needs the money. But you see that he covers it.”

“Lo-lo-mi,” I agreed heartily; “Mr. Leaming will please write his check for one thousand dollars, while Tommie endorses this certificate of deposit.”

Two thousand in the first sale. It started them. The closest financial shark of all the Indians present hurried to his sand-bank and came back with four hundred dollars. And Leaming grinned a golden grin of relief when he produced his thousand to match the first sale.

“Tommie had me worried,” the genial principal admitted. “I could meet him for several thousands, but Tom might have sold his herd of cattle, and I should have lost caste throughout the whole district.”

Another evidence of Hopi thrift and credit is to be found in the “reimbursable” records. About 1914 the Government instituted a plan of loaning money to Indians, through their Agents, for the purchase of livestock, implements, seed, building-materials, and so on. I was not impressed with this plan, and to-day the Washington Office would like to have some one advise how to collect its outstanding reimbursables. The worthy charity provided many Indians with money without interest, and with practically no security assuring repayment. As an instance of this, the Mohave Indians found themselves embarrassed by these gifts, and in 1922 owed more than $34,000, they having had about forty thousand crowded on to them by a former superintendent. They had been crushed by debt for years. At least eighty-five per cent of the Mohave reimbursable was outstanding and delinquent, and with the best of fortune at least twenty per cent of it a total loss.

The always cautious Hopi approached this experiment gingerly. He is suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts. When he promises to pay, he expects to pay; and too, I did not rush forth, laden with money and generosity, to crowd them into debt. Between 1914 and 1915, my scruples having been argued away by a squad of non-visioning clerks who now wish that they had possessed a little less enthusiasm, I did advance $10,627 to the Hopi Indians. This money was placed in wagons, harness, and livestock. Within four years they had repaid seventy-five per cent of the advance, and of the remainder it was estimated that not more than $300 would be lost.

So the frontier work went on. We were building schools, quarters, and a hospital; fighting dirt, disease, and superstition; improving livestock, and selling it, and washing wool; experimenting with trees and plants; hawking bonds, and lending money, and holding court; checking traders’ prices and guaranteeing Navajo blankets; policing Snake Dances, trapping bootleggers, and offending tourists; meantime struggling with the summer floods, and the mud and quicksands afterward, and the winter drifts. When the roads were destroyed, we somehow rebuilt them—and then prepared to rebuild them again.

The Desert was a busy place. And when daylight failed, I reported it all to an unappreciative, often snarling Bureau, twenty-six hundred miles away, that understood little and corrected less, while it asked senseless questions that must be answered, made foolish decisions, and prepared for the field as many handicaps as distant ignorance and lack of sympathy could contrive.

There were compensations, however. Drives along the mesa ledges and across the wide vacant valleys gave time for planning; and each excursion was an adventure. At five miles the hour a sturdy team does not demand the alertness that an auto compels at twenty. Traffic did not bother one. Only an occasional flock of sheep, a straying pony, or a somnolent freight-team blocked the road. The drowsy hours of midday, filled with the humming noises of the Desert, blessed by sunshine and the wondrous panorama of the Empire, could make up for many frontier irritations.

Sometimes one caught vistas into forgotten ages. Far away across the lower plain, as at the edge of a greenish sea, lifted those strange shapes, the Moqui Buttes. I had seen them frozen in a pallid sky; again half lost in the fog and swirls of dust-storms; and again as drifting mounds, with the one farthest west like a flat-headed Sphinx, touching the clouds; and always they had been somnolent headlands, half obscured. But one November day the sun burnt winter gold, and magic touched the Desert. It stretched a placid sea along their coast line of Parrish blue, that richest color of the fairies; and the many peaks were flat against a golden screen. Some lonely galley, heeling under old sails, was all it lacked; and I paused on the mesa-ledge to catch the sound of surf on enchanted beaches. The Coast of Romance! It would have ensnared that wanderer of the Greeks:—

My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die;
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.

There they were, dreaming, awaiting a belated argosy of the years: the farthest Happy Isles, where—who knows?—in the days of the great waters, when the Desert floors were covered, some wily Ulysses may have landed and heard the songs of Circe.

XIX

OUR FRIENDS, THE TOURISTS

He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting
the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I
really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I
not children, of whom it was my duty to take care.

“Sir, by so doing, you would do what would be of importance
in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre
reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would
be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone
to visit the wall of China.” Boswell’s Johnson

The Grand Cañon of the Colorado was once, in the minds of white men, an Indian fable. It exists to-day. It is now familiar ground. Getting there is an easy, quite luxurious journey, if one has the money. The Santa Fe Railway system has removed all the one-time misery and terror of the desert route to it. The hostile tribes, the sun and thirst that plagued Don Pedro de Tovar and Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540, when given leave to discover what truth was in the Cibola stories, have been subdued by engineers and steam. Coronado’s search for treasure cities and fabulous mines, for Quivira, ended in weariness, failure, disillusion; and his record in obscurity. Cardenas saw the Grand Cañon, while Tovar found something that should endear his name to the ubiquitous tourist. He located the Hopi Indians under their castellated cliffs. Now—had Tovar seen a Snake Dance! Although he arrived in August, that was denied him.

Thus a Wall of China was prepared in America nearly four centuries ago, and through “spirit and curiosity,” male and female wearing pants, tourists seek it to-day. When the clans have all gone back to the Underworld, leaving their educated young to jazz and evangelists, the wall will retreat northward to the silent cavern-cities and the monuments of the Utah border, to Betatakin, and Kitsiel, and Inscription House. When a Service station desecrates the beautiful Laguna Cañon—the Tsegi—the wall will make a last stand at Rainbow Bridge—Nunashoshe—that great archway of the triumphant desert gods.

Tourists! Age does not wither them. I remember a very old lady, traveling alone. Alone she arrived on the mail-stage, obsessed by a mission, quite as Kim’s lama. Having viewed one hundred miles of desert beauty from the mail car, she caught a little sleep, and then aroused me Sunday morning, quite early, with determined cries. Thinking that someone had been injured, I very nearly greeted her in pajamas, to learn that her search must be continued, and that it required an automobile or other conveyance. I referred her to the local trader, who also slept late of Sundays, and he sleepily turned her over to Ed. Ed told me of it later. He said that he “packed” her about sixty miles farther, hither and yon, around the Moqui cliffs and through the tinted valleys. She granted him not a croak of interest. And when he was thoroughly tired out, with the gas “about all,” and the hour late enough to suggest a return to the post, she halted him with:—

“Now, my man, I’ve seen this, and it is very fine indeed; but—I came to see the Painted Desert.”

“And we had been a-trompin’ it all day!” said Ed.

Nor does their curiosity decay. I recall a party that came upon us one evening, just at twilight. They erected tents, and stretched around them the fetish of a hair-rope, though no snake would have ventured near that camp for many gophers. Their cook banged his pan, and they came and “got it.” The mail-stage pulled in late that season, and my miscellaneous collection of letters, newspapers, and books from everywhere would be dumped in the trader’s private office, a combined place of business, art gallery, and Agent’s rest. By the open fire I would dissect this mail, and reduce its bulk to ashes. But this night “dudes” filled the room and wrangled over a pile of Navajo blankets. An old man of the party pestered me with searching questions.

“Is this a good blanket—worth forty dollars?” he asked.

“Quite good. You may depend on Mr. Hubbell’s prices.”

“I would rather deal directly with the natives.”

“May I advise you not to? The trader is regulated, the Indian is not. Many persons have lost their eyeteeth in a rug-deal with the Navajo. Besides, you have no guaranty from them. That blanket is guaranteed.”

“And by whom?”

“By me, as Agent.”

“But the Hopi,—or is it Moqui?—they are different. One of them offered to sell me a ceremonial altar at Oraibi.”

“Sorry, sir; but you could not purchase it.”

“Who would object?”

“I would, as Agent.”

“And this prehistoric pottery I have seen—”

“It is recovered from graves, by Indians. It may not be sold or transported from the State.”

“Who issued that order?”

“When the Office forgot it, I did, for this Reservation.”

“Ah, yes—you are the Agent here. Now what are your authorities?”

“Well, one might say, the supervision of everything.”

“Is that your mail—your official mail?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have many duties?”

“Quite a few.”

“What is your salary?”

I dropped the letter of the Department that I had been trying to decipher between questions, arose calmly, and led the old gentleman aside.

“That,” I said in a whisper, “is a State secret. There is an agreement between the War Department and the Interior Department, entered into just after the Navajo Treaty of 1868, and concurred in by every President since Andrew Johnson, that no Indian Agent of the Navajo country shall ever divulge the exact size of his reward. He may, with discretion, reduce the sum in speaking of it; but he may not under liability of extreme penalty, give out the true figures. It might encourage the native to revolt. You see my position?”

“Naturally,” he said. He wiped his brow. He was simply overpowered. And he bothered me no more.

But Messrs. Weber and Fields’ famous answer would have been more appropriate. “I’m ashamed to tell you.”

And in early August come letters to the Agency. The queries are many and various.

“Please furnish the date of the Snake Dance.”

“Will you send me a permit to Oskaloosa, Michigan?”

“Mail me a permit to the El Tovar, Grand Cañon, where I will meet
my wife and see if she wants to come.”

“Are moving pictures permitted, and if not, why not?”

“What are the rates at the Hopi hotels?”

“Is it good form to carry an umbrella in the Desert?”

“A Hopi woman sold me a loaf of bread in 1895. I want some of that
bread this trip.”

“Please reserve me a room and bath; I will arrive on the
eighteenth.”

All these should be answered, to the effect that the date of the dance will be given to the press as soon as known; that permits are issued when the permittee arrives; that there are no hotels; that the Agent can reserve nothing; that tourists should provide themselves with camping equipment and come prepared for rain. Does not the Snake Dance produce rain? The thunder mutters and the rain-clouds lower ominously, if no rain falls. There will be a drencher in the fortnight of the Snake Dance, one may be sure; and it often occurs so shortly thereafter as to cause one to wonder how the priests dope it out. In 1911 the storm broke just at the close of the ceremony. It broke immediately over me, as I perched on top of the Dance Plaza rock. That is an excellent place for an unobstructed view of the whole show, but it has an enormous—and unforeseen by me—disadvantage, in that one may wish to get down at a specific moment, as I did. And at that moment, the tribe’s collection of snakes, scores of them, hissing, writhing, entangled, were thrown into the sacred-meal circle just below my dangling feet. I did not get down. I sat there in the rain, and soaked.

A slicker, or oiled-coat such as fishermen wear, is an important part of a desert outfit. It does not weigh much, it may prove useful in covering the hood of the engine when bucking flooded washes, and it will certainly protect its owner after the Hopi prayer for rain. Pack one in from the railroad towns; for while the desert traders carry them, the demand is often heavy enough to exhaust stocks. Like the Texan’s gun, it may not be needed; but if needed, it will be “wanted damn bad.”

Comes also to the Agent a telegram from the Commissioner: HOPE YOU ARE DOING NOTHING TO ENCOURAGE HOPI SNAKE DANCE—just that. Already advertising or lurid press-stories have announced the date in Washington. The somnolent Bureau, that so often finds it inexpedient to administer justice, arouses itself and heaves the telegram over three thousand miles. Never shall it be said that the joys of the savage should receive sympathetic understanding. By no means permit them to be happy in their way. Teach them to be happy in our way. Encourage that broad spirit of charity we invite from Kansas via the Civil Service examinations. But do these things without hurting the native’s feelings. Never act so as to arouse or even risk antagonism. “Do nothing to encourage the Snake Dance,” but remember, if you have an urge to discourage it, that we have not directed you to do anything. We have simply expressed the hope that you will successfully do nothing.

And the Agent, whoever he may be, has just finished wrestling with the last of his fiscal-year accounts, closing June thirtieth and requiring all of July to assemble. He has signed 7863 papers of different colors and symbols, all explaining his honesty. He has completed one thousand calculations forming the statistical section of his Annual Report, long arrays of figures, giving the exact value of each washtub, proving the altitude and longitude of everything, from the number of sheep the Indians devour in a year and why, to the number of tacks used in fixing the linoleum to his kitchen floor. He will have recently emerged from the impotent phrases of his narrative Report, a mandatory composition of past woes and future griefs, destined to fill an Eastern pigeonhole. These things are fetishes, thieves of time and destroyers of efficiency, worshiped by the Bureau as the documentary reason for its existence. Like prefaces, they are hopefully prepared, but seldom read, and certainly never acted on.

The Agent will pause long enough to sign a permit—a colored slip of paper printed over with regulations having a local significance. Read them; for he will not have time to read them to you. He has had them printed for a purpose—the purpose of relieving him of explanations.

Should the Agent appear a trifle acrid in manner, have patience. He may have just opened a batch of exceptions to his last year’s accounts, rebuking him many times for intelligently carrying on the business of the Government, when absence of intelligence would have been much cheaper and approved. Or he may have received one of those Departmental questionnaires, calculated on the abacus of economy, and propounding solemnly something like this:—

It is noted that you mine coal, and request $3000 annually for the
pay of miners. This seems beyond all reason. The Office has been
informed on good authority that excellent bituminous coal may be
purchased at five dollars the ton, f.o.b. Gallup, New Mexico. Would
it not be advisable to purchase fuel in Gallup? You are directed to
procure bids f.o.b. your station, and transmit them to the Office
for consideration and comparison with your mining costs.

“Yes,” you are startled to hear him comment aloud; “The advanced class in idiocy will now recite. Required: 2000 tons of coal, now mined within two miles of the bunkers, costing $1.50 per ton. Would it not be efficacious, not to say superb and miasmic, to purchase at Gallup, ship in cars one hundred miles to Holbrook, and thence haul eighty miles in wagons at one cent per pound cartage? Total cost, $27.00 per ton delivered, plus handling-losses and slackage. Ask me?”

But this inane query, signed by the Commissioner without reading, as he talked of the November elections with Congressman Grampus, must be answered. The record must be fixed in the mausoleum of files. The Agent will finally deny himself to Indians having real business requiring his attention, will neglect other duties, while he laboriously composes a fulsome answer, figuring the cost to five decimal places, and proving that $1.50 per ton in hand, supervised, is cheaper than $27.00 per ton on the road. He recommends—of course respectfully—that he be authorized to continue mining the coal God gave the Indians, until such time as the field may be leased to a syndicate; and then, with true official loyalty to those who arrange leases, to purchase from the syndicate, thus maintaining a perfect parity between whites who need money and Indians who do not need coal.

Before you harshly judge this desert pessimist, reflect a bit. He will be found sufficiently educated to issue you a permit. In the long nights of winter he has time for reading and reflection. The ignorance of the Desert is slowly disappearing before education; but no one has endowed a grammar school for the relief of those you place in Washington.

Classes in simple geography and numbers would help.

Each season more and more people come to view the Prayer for Rain. Not all are strangers. Many Navajo ride in from the ranges, tribal differences for the moment forgotten, just as they attend the fiestas of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; and the Hopi are equally hospitable with food and fruit at this their gala time. Many white guests repeat, year after year. Next to our trading friends, the Hubbells, father and son, who undoubtedly hold the record as to regular attendance, there is an engineer of the Indian Service who has viewed more Snake Dances than any other seriously engaged man. My own record is not insignificant. But this class is at home in the country, with business or duties or friendship to excuse it.

It is the sort of outing that true sons of Arizona enjoy. Carl Hayden, of Congress, has kept one eye on a Snake Dance and both ears open to Hopi conditions. Governors Hunt and Campbell have been found there repeatedly, and Governor Hunt has sought to preserve its record in pictures for the State Capitol at Phoenix and the museum of the University of Arizona at Tucson. In these men the Hopi have had good friends, and at least one Moungwi found them filled with understanding of the Desert and its peculiar conditions.

At Walpi one has a fit setting for a theatrical ceremony. Roosevelt wrote of it, “In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque sight.”

The place of the dance is a narrow shelf at the very edge of the mesa. The houses of the people, tier on tier, terraced into little balconies, form a back-drop. Through these houses, and leading from the shelf, a tunnel gives on to another street. The ledge is simply a continuation of the rock roadway that skirts the brink of the village, overhanging the wide First Mesa Valley. There is a sheer drop from this edge, straight down at least sixty feet, to the masses of shattered stone and drifted sand that buttress the mesa and shelve off hundreds of feet more into the orchards. At each end of this shelf is an underground kiva, marked by its projecting ladder-poles. A curiously eroded rock seems to balance at one end of the little plaza, between the houses and the precipice. Before Walpi was evolved for purposes of defense, this rock existed. Probably it was because of this freak that the place was selected for the rites of the tribe.

The ground-area available to spectators and dancers measures about ninety feet in length and not more than thirty in width. This approximate twenty-seven hundred square feet must contain about forty Indian actors and a large percentage of the mob, to say nothing of the snakes, a most important and active feature of the meeting, among which are many rattlers. It is like staging a nervous ballet on the cornice of the Woolworth Building, knowing that fifty mice will be turned loose on signal.

The wisest of the visitors seek places on the balconies and housetops; but not all of them can be accommodated there. Many are forced, if they would see anything, to stand on the ledge with the dancers. Dense groups mass at each end of the plaza and along the house-walls, and men and boys, white and red, stand four-deep on the outer edge, facing the snakes, and with a death-drop behind them. A tourist who would hesitate about hunting a rattlesnake out of a bush will at this time develop courage beyond all understanding.

When I first noted the possibility—the probability—of accident at this unguarded mesa-brink, I proposed stretching a stout rope along it as some small measure of precaution; and I summoned the old Snake man to advise him of its purpose. A rope there might easily have been against the traditions, and I was new at the game of supervision. From the kiva came a nude figure and stood before me in the sight of the multitude. The interpreter explained my plan.

“I see,” said the old man, nodding; “these people are your friends, and you do not want them hurt.”

Now I did not care to vouch for all those present, and so corrected him.

“No, they are not my friends—not all of them; they are people who travel about the country and come to see your dance.”

“Didn’t you send them letters—write to them to come?”

“No.”

“Well,” he concluded, “I didn’t send for them. They are no friends of mine. And you say they are not friends of yours. Why should we care about it? Let them fall off.”

But notwithstanding his unconcern, every year I had a rope stretched there, and compelled the daring to stand behind it. This too prevented them from crowding the dancers, which the Indians appreciated; for when a man is juggling an angry snake he doesn’t crave close company, and I have seen an annoyed dancer thrash a tourist across the face, using a live snake as his whip.

Some day the breaking of house rafters, or a flurry of panic at the mesa edge may present tragedy as a closing feature of this ceremony. “Let them fall off” may yet have a grim sound.

The rites are conducted by the Indians with solemnity and reverence. It is not a show in a juggler’s booth, to be guyed and ridiculed. But when one of the poisonous snakes has coiled, and is hissing and rattling and striking, just the time when one would think spectators would become more tense, that is when taunts are flung and a perfect bedlam of thoughtless merriment arises. Were there fewer visitors, as at minor ceremonies, they would be reproved; but the Hopi are a patient people, and they never insisted that these strangers behave themselves; they only expected that the visitor would keep his place, and not attempt to join the dance, a thing that some wild whites—including a few wild women—are only too ready to do. You now see all the standpoint of the old priest.

Each tourist packs one of those devices sold by Mr. Eastman. At many of the ceremonies, particularly the Flute Dance, cameras are barred by the Hopi, and I had their restriction respected. But when I proposed to increase the tribe’s revenue by taxing each visitor a dollar for the camera privilege, the clan thought it good business, and asked me to arrange it. I had camera tags prepared, and the trails to the top policed. Each policeman was accompanied by a representative of the clan, who sold the tags, and who carried a sack of money to change anything up to a fifty-dollar bill. Usually twenties were thrust forward, and promptly nineteen hard, cumbersome cart-wheels were dumped into the canny tourist’s lap. It was disconcerting to those who sought that form of evasion. Occasionally came one who demanded a decision of the Supreme Court against this outrage, chanting invariably that he was a taxpayer, and often adding that he knew Wilson, or whoever happened to occupy the place of Chief Magistrate. But backing the collector was the imperturbable Indian policeman, who did not pay taxes and who did not know Wilson. The policeman knew Moungwi only, who had been found ready to “stand behind,” as an officer put it. Either pay “una peso,” “shu-kashe-vah,” “thathli ibeso,” or “one iron-man,” in Spanish, Hopi, Navajo, or Americanese, whatever language you cared to have it in, or surrender that black devil-box in which a man’s spirit may be imprisoned.

One dollar! Yet there were many who sought to evade, and forced unpleasantness; there were a few who flatly refused to pay and yielded their kodaks; there was even one who tried to steal a moving-picture film, who was hunted down at night in the black desert, caught in the early morning, handcuffed, lodged in the Agency hoosegow, and had his precious record confiscated for Uncle Samuel, who preserves it in Washington to-day. This tricky envoy of a famous news-service has related in a magazine his harrowing experience, giving me full credit as his one-time host. I have not space in which to analyze his inaccuracies. Suffice it to say that he cost one very tired and harassed Moungwi and two hard-boiled rangemen a night’s rest. He should know that every trail to the railroad was watched, and he would just as surely have been apprehended and had his outfit confiscated had he escaped to the Mecca of Los Angeles, that windy city out of which he worked. The jurisdiction of the Indian Agent extended there, or for that matter anywhere, in connection with a plot affecting his wards.

There was a midnight conference with the visiting official then acting as Commissioner, who, surrounded by loneliness and an empty sterility, not having at his beck a Law Board, seemed bewildered. For once, delay could not be sought by mail. There was no one to receive the buck. A Departmental order was being laughed at. Despite the possibility of ridicule, the visiting mandarin feared that I might jar the gentle traditions and affect several votes in Southern California.

“I can handle him on the reservation,” I said, anxious to be off. “What I want to know, and all I want to know, is, do you authorize me to follow him to the Coast?”

The Acting Commissioner shivered in his pajamas. It is cold at those altitudes, even on August nights; and when one is standing barefoot, you know, and being pressed for a warrant—he wavered into the wrong pew, for he said: “Ask Shelton about it.”