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

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

The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of deep sand, and more of rock [143]outcroppings, and then appeared the fields of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food. The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.

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

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

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

“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They knew when you arrived at Oraibi [144]yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you left the Agency and started out this way.”

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

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

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

The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony [145]odor,—although it may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent, with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.

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

Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her, and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself, perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was because of his threatening this woman. [146]

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

And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who built a huge mission atop [147]their penal height, the beams coming from San Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles. One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.

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

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

“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been given to bluffing, and buying. [148]

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

In 1890 the defiance of the Oraibi first caused notice. Old Lo-lo-lo-mi, their good chief, had been to Washington, and had agreed to place the children of his faction in the school. His counsels were disregarded by the opposition; in fact they imprisoned the old man and threatened him with death for this lapse from the traditions. Lo-lo-lo-mi was “too good,” as his name implied. The sub-Agent, Mr. Ralph Collins, arrested several of the war-chiefs and sent them to their Agent at Fort Defiance. When they returned they busied themselves making more trouble; so troops were sent to pacify and coerce them, and the first great blunder was made by an army officer. This officer accompanied Collins to the Oraibi mesa. They were warned that the hostiles had armed and meant to fight. Believing this to be so much bluff, they ascended the mesa to the pueblo. A war-chief, who had refused to attend a council, stepped out on one of the terraced houses. He was painted for the occasion, carried a rifle, [149]and looked the part of his office. He was joined by a medicine man, who wore a raw sheepskin that dripped blood and besmeared his body. These two, knowing of many sympathizers within the hovels, dared the whites to combat and greatly abused them. The two white men prudently retired after an abortive parley.

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

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

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

The prisoners taken at this time were sent to Fort Wingate. In a few months they were released on promise to be good, but when they returned from captivity they too refused to keep the parole given. The goose of an officer had produced a flock of ganders, and his work was to live for nearly three decades. In 1894 troops were again in demand at Oraibi, and nineteen of the Indian leaders [150]were sent as prisoners to Alcatraz Island. They were imprisoned about eight months, and returned impenitent.

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

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

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

“Who are you?” asked the troubled Oraibi, when invited to a council with him. [151]

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

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

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

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

Now this was a terrible blow to dignity, and hurt all Washington. Matters did not improve, and by 1906 the trouble had increased to the point where troops were necessary once again. They came. They rehearsed their parts perfectly, and prisoners were taken. A special inspector was sent in to observe matters, and he found himself in a very embarrassing position. The one hundred [152]captives had arranged a hunger strike. Receipts for their prison mess-equipment had been demanded of them, in strict accordance with the farcical methods of accounting then in vogue. The true Hopi hostile, loyal to high-priest Youkeoma, has never signed for anything. He is reared to be wary of the white man’s papers. As he cannot read them for himself, he classes everything in the nature of a document along with the white man’s word, as illustrated by the first army officer who betrayed him.

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

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

I did not blame them in great measure, for at least four [153]had been married men when taken from the pueblo. Their wives now had other consorts, other children. The children of the rebel fathers would not forgive them, because they repudiated the faithless wives. The fathers blamed the Government for not protecting their households. And the women said to me:—

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

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

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

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

But notwithstanding my sympathies, I could never soften the hatred of one of the sons. He hated his father [154]because of his mother’s treatment, and above all this he hated white men, including me. The stupid sins of one Moungwi are inherited by another in the line of succession.

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

He could tell me this in straight English, as at my desert school he had received a good grammar foundation; and he was not interrupted or punished, because I encouraged the pupils to come to me and speak their minds. But, being stronger, I elected to do these things for him, having in mind his individual interests as separate and apart from the feuds of the past; but I could not severely blame him for his stubborn opposition. He was a very bright lad, and became an exceptional student; but just as surely he returned finally to his “own unclean people, savagely.” Three weeks on the roads, breaking stone and wheeling sand, would have done more to cure that father’s rebellious attitude than those years at Carlisle, exiled from his household and all of life that he understood and cared for. To be sure,—and to be fair to his instructors,—the man learned a great deal at Carlisle, which was a very fine school; and more than this, he saw the wonders of the white man. He was one of the first to witness an air flight. And when he told his ancients at the pueblo of these strange and unbelievable things he had seen in Philadelphia, [155]they arose in wrath, knocked out their ceremonial pipes, and denounced him as the greatest liar unhung. So even by the elders, whose lost cause he had espoused and suffered for, he was repudiated and damned. Few patriots get such treatment as this. He was completely ostracized at home. To keep him in food, I employed him as a local policeman, hoping he would revenge himself; but this commission brought him only additional scorn and reprobation. For long he lived at Hotevilla as a pelican in the desert; where else could he live? Was it not home?

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

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

Government moves with a truly fearsome swiftness. I realize now, after thirteen years of report-swapping and buck-passing, that some miracle happened in that my [156]suggestion was considered at all. I have been told that a friend assured the Secretary of the Interior that I was not a maniac. But it required until September 27, 1911 to request the Secretary of War to detail cavalry from a distant point, when troops were idle at Fort Apache only one hundred and eighty miles away—quite in the neighborhood, as desert spaces are considered. Another month drifted by, and on October 28 the Secretary of War detailed Hugh L. Scott, then Colonel in rank, as an officer of Indian experience likely to have influence with these strange people. Under date of November 15 I was directed to coöperate with Colonel Scott, and as no allowance was made for the fact that it was winter and mails likely to be delayed along the one hundred and five miles of wagon-transport, the great Indian diplomatist and his officers and men reached the Moqui Agency before my orders. Four months had been devoted to the delicate untwisting of red tape that a telephone conversation between Departments and a telegram to the nearest post would have settled in twenty-four hours’ time. How comfortable if those Hopi had been Ute, Apache, Navajo, or Sioux! [157]