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

Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone, a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace, but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, [102]and its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large, pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough, and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet, and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat.

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

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

After the conquest of Cibola, or Zuni, Tovar was dispatched by Coronado to locate the seven cities of the Mohoqui. Notwithstanding the fighting in the Zuni provinces, [103]the coming of pale men who rode strange animals and carried sticks that discharged lightning, it would appear that the Hopi knew nothing of these happenings. Tovar, leading a company of cavalry and footmen, crossed into their country without discovery, and encamped one night before a Hopi pueblo. It is recorded that they approached close enough to hear the people talking in their homes. Morning revealed the Spanish spears.

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

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

When the great Pueblo rebellion occurred in 1680, the mission at Awatobi was destroyed by the Hopi, and its friar, Fray José de Figueroa, was killed.1 When came De Vargas, bent on reconquering the Pueblo people, he halted before Awatobi on November 19, 1692. The friars [104]planned a return to their duties among the Hopi, and it would appear that the Awatobans, or a part of them, received these advances. Because of this the pueblo of Awatobi was suddenly destroyed in the latter part of 1700 by pagan Hopi from the other mesas. It is said that many of the warriors were stifled in the ceremonial kivas, and the women and children were carried off as captives. During the early years of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials and priests still contemplated a return to this territory, but the efforts were abortive, although as late as 1748 friars visited the Second Mesa country to return fugitive Indians of the Pueblos proper to their homes in the valley of the Rio Grande. Most of these were Sandias, the remnant of this band now living close to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and when I took charge of the Pueblo Indians in 1919, the Sandias above all others evidenced characteristics that were not new to one who had sat in council with their ancient hosts.

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

My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope. Not even the [105]size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira, including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then, having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await whatever the white man might see fit to do about it.

That was my inheritance.

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

I became more familiar with mesa trails thereafter, but this first one was a thrill. Sand had blown into the road, and the wheels crunched through it, and the brakes ground and screeched against the tires. [106]

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

I silently wished he would attend to his driving.

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

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

It was disappointing—a lonely, dreary place. No trees or hedges relieved the starved-looking site. There was little to be proud of. As for the natural beauties, one must grow to feel the majesty of worn rocks, tinted in all the shades of weathering sandstone, from saffron through gold to ruddy brown, toned to a thousand delicate hues by the stunted cedars and diversified cacti that struggled from every crevice. In the springtime there would be flowers in the crannies, winsome purple and pink flowers, with here and there the blazing scarlet of the Indian paintbrush; and in springtime too would come the great flocks of migratory birds. [107]

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

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

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

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The Agency consisted of an office and quarters and shops for the clerks, farmers, and mechanics, and there was a school for about one hundred and fifty pupils of the grammar grades. This was a boarding-school and, in addition to teachers, it had a corps of cooks, matrons, [108]laundress, and seamstress, all necessary to the work. In the field, close to the pueblos of the Indians, were five day-schools, serving from fifty to one hundred and twenty children each, and stations for physicians, field-nurses, and range men. Therefore the equipment, furniture, and stores of six small settlements had to be inventoried and receipted for at any change of directors.

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

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

That time of inventory I recall as a bad dream. Every conceivable article of useless equipment had been dumped and carefully preserved at that post. The greatest care had been taken of the most useless. Once, when the tailors of Chicago were long on swatches, they presented them to the Indian Service, and to save storage the warehouse custodian had promptly shipped them to the most distant [109]point, the Moqui Agency, in the hope and quite sure belief that they would never come back. Aside from transcontinental railroad charges, Indian wagoners had hauled such precious supplies from the receiving station, one hundred miles, at a cartage of one cent per pound. So it was with hundreds of lamp-chimneys that never fitted a lamp, clothing too small for infants or too large for giants, machetes that were needed in the Cuban cane-fields, tools that Noah would have spurned, and broadcast seeders for use where the Indians plant corn with ceremonial sticks. One warehouse was jammed with wagon-repair material, spokes, fellies, bolsters, and so on, of dimensions that must have been current in the period of the pioneers.

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

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

The technical names that came across Kansas with our forefathers had not changed. “Eveners” and “whiffle-trees” [110]were recognized; but double and swingle-trees were taboo.

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

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

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

At the same time the employees of the station were existing in pasteboard cottages designed for the climate of Southern California, and winter at that altitude—[111]6600 feet—would bring many nights below zero. One couple lived in a tent heated by a sheet-iron stove; the miner lodged in a cupboard, and the chief mechanic’s family occupied a cellar. They were all, according to the Civil Service announcements, entitled to “quarters,” and did they not have them?

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

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

We scrambled out to catch the heads of the horses. [112]

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

“Didn’t you see it?” he mumbled.

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

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

Another precious ideal exploded. [113]