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 Those who once made the effort to penetrate the Hopi-Navajo area of the Enchanted Empire have withdrawn, defeated and outwitted.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 [225]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 [226]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 [227]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 [228]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 [229]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 [230]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 [231]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. [232]

“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 [233]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 [234]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 [235]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.” [236]

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. [237]

“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 [238]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 [239]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:—

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. [240]